THE GRIEVING
Peace came for Vietnam and the U.S. nearly 40 years ago.
It has not yet come for the family of John Fitzgibbons ’67
By Zachary Jason ’11

P R O L O G UE
hearts and minds

T

his a good time to be a Vietnam War historian.
Scholarship on the war is undergoing a renaissance
comparable to that touched off in the 1980s by the
first wave of declassified U.S. government documents. Then,
researchers such as Georgia State University’s Larry Berman
and the late George Kahin established that pretty much
everything Americans thought they knew about Lyndon
Johnson as commander-in-chief was false. Far from being
a trigger-happy hawk, LBJ emerged in Berman’s Planning
a Tragedy (1983) and Kahin’s Intervention (1986) as having
grave misgivings about escalation. He nonetheless chose to
deepen the U.S. commitment to South Vietnam in a tacit
bargain with congressional conservatives—of both parties—
to protect his Great Society programs. Conspiracy theorists
also had to abandon their claim that Johnson deliberately deceived Congress about purported North Vietnamese
attacks on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, in August
1964. LBJ, it turned out, was convinced that both incidents
had occurred, and his request for the functional equivalent of
a declaration of war was, if ill-considered, sincere.
Nowadays, the surprises mostly come from the other
side of the iron and bamboo curtains. Although Chinese and
Russian wartime records remain far from open, Beijing and
Moscow have released thousands of pages of military, political, and diplomatic papers, enabling, for example, Auburn
University’s Qiang Zhai to prove that Mao Zedong’s threats
to commit combat forces if U.S. soldiers crossed the 17th
parallel into North Vietnam were no bluff. China’s assistance exceeded U.S. estimates. Until the Cultural Revolution
obliged Mao to curtail foreign engagements, almost 300,000
Chinese technicians served in North Vietnam, building roads
and railways and repairing bombed facilities, and Beijing
supplied Hanoi with tens of millions of dollars worth of
military hardware. Historians have discovered fewer smoking guns in Russia, but Confronting Vietnam (2003), by Ilya
Gaiduk of the Russian Academy of Sciences, illuminates the
diplomatic role the Soviets played in Vietnam’s unification
The Democratic Republic of Vietnam, whose archives
were off-limits into the 21st century, has granted access to
a few persistent American researchers, and the results have
been revelatory. Lien-Hang Nguyen’s blockbuster 2012
monograph Hanoi’s War, for instance, demonstrates that
Ho Chi Minh, the face of Vietnamese communism and the
focus of U.S. analyses, was not in fact the principal figure in
the North Vietnamese Politburo; that distinction belonged

to General Secretary Lê Duan, a ruthless behind-the-scenes
strategist during the “American War” who overruled higherprofile officials like Ho to launch major offensives in 1964,
1968, and 1972. Nguyen, a historian at the University of
Kentucky, also puts to rest a question that vexed historians for decades: What was the relationship between the
northern-based Communist Party and the southern National
Liberation Front? American hawks, it seems, were correct in
branding the front a puppet of Hanoi, although the difficult
communicating along Vietnam’s one thousand miles of often
harsh terrain gave NLF members a measure of autonomy.
Scholars who lack the linguistic skills to exploit Chinese,
Russian, or Vietnamese repositories (or the document troves
of France, South Korea, and Thailand) are enhancing our
knowledge of the war fought on the home front. Some
draw from private papers—those of the antiwar activist
Benjamin Spock; Oleo Strut (the Texas coffeehouse near
Fort Hood—named for a helicopter part—that became a
base of operations for protesting GIs); and the American
Friends of Vietnam, a U.S. lobby organized to burnish
South Vietnamese President Ngô Dình Diêm’s image. Other
researchers, caught up in diplomatic history’s trending “cultural turn,” deploy prisms of race, gender, and religion to
explain why and how U.S. statesmen sought to create an
anticommunist bastion out of a former French colony on
the other side of the world. A campaign for postmodernist analysis has not been far behind (see the 2013 essay by
the University of Akron’s Walter Hixson, “Viet Nam and
‘Vietnam’ in American History and Memory”).
All this ferment is propitious for those of us who study
the Vietnam War for a living. But something important
can be lost when America’s most divisive foreign conflict is
sublimated into the rarefied air of the ivory tower. The burly
veteran who told me at the Memorial Wall in Washington,
D.C., last June that “you professors don’t know a goddamned thing about Vietnam” was justified in his anger,
as was his son, who helped the nearly sightless man locate
names cut into the polished black granite. This war, which
academics like me debate, was a vast human tragedy, not an
intellectual exercise. Zachary Jason’s story—pitched to the
heart—begins on page 24.
—seth jacobs
Seth Jacobs is an associate professor of history and the author of
The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold
War Laos (2012).

Contents

boston college magazine

2 Letters
4 Linden
Lane

From “Ad venture,” pg. 16

F E AT UR E S
16 AD VENTURE
From dorm room to the top-floor office, from
incubator to accelerator, the saga (so far) of
a student startup
By Janelle Nanos ’02

Not just another news
cycle • Taking the hardest
undergraduate math test
around • The Council for
Women at 10 • The Xcel
retreat for student-athletes
• Lessons in botany, business, and construction at
the Lynch School • From
the laboratories

The year is 1986, and
the author is 19. The
setting is rural, a barracks in Central Russia
• The Chinese school
of Christian art • What
Catholic moral theologians reach for when
they work • Hades and
the Linguists

50 Class
Notes
80 Inquiring
Minds

A historian’s lucky
encounter with an
18-century Damascan

81 Works
& Days

24 MEMORIAL DAYS
For 45 years after John Fitzgibbons ’67 was
killed on a night patrol in Tây Ninh Province,
Vietnam, his family seldom spoke of its shattering loss. Then a package arrived

Policy advocate Jody
Kent Lavy ‘02

By Zachary Jason ’11

on the cover: First Lieutenant John Fitzgibbons ’67 in a
photograph taken the year he graduated, with letters he
wrote to Bob Murphy ’67 from Vietnam.
Photograph by Gary Wayne Gilbert

Many thanks for the article on the work
of Daniel Harrington, SJ, and Christopher
Matthews in producing New Testament
Abstracts every four months (“Abstract
Artists,” by William Bole, Fall 2013). Dan
was one of the finest Jesuits, priests, and
people I’ve ever met. It’s not a stretch to
say that his courses on the New Testament
changed my life—as they did countless
others at the Weston Jesuit School of
Theology and the Boston College School
of Theology and Ministry. Today I see the
Gospel through his eyes. Your article was
a reminder of the tireless, faithful and generous work of this saintly man.
James Martin, SJ, M.Div.’98, Th.M.’99
New York, New York
BCM has received word that Daniel J.
Harrington, SJ, died February 7 at the Jesuits’
Campion Center in Weston, Massachusetts,
after a four-year battle with cancer.

area. Called “Literature & Medicine: The
Humanities at the Heart of Healthcare,”
the seminars bring doctors, nurses, social
workers, hospital administrators, and
other medical professionals together
around a common set of literary works—
novels, memoirs, short stories, poems—
selected to illuminate issues they confront
on a daily basis.
Ongoing evaluation of the program
demonstrates the efficacy of the humanities in helping healthcare providers to better understand the needs and concerns of
patients and their families. Boston College
students who take advantage of the medical humanities minor and go on to careers
in healthcare will be better at what they do
and will find their work more rewarding.
David Tebaldi
Northampton, Massachusetts
The author is the executive director of
the Massachusetts Foundation for the
Humanities.

FREEZE FRAMES

Re “Soul on Ice,” by Dave Denison
(Summer 2013): The only thing more captivating than the cover story on James Balog
was seeing him in action in the NOVA special “Extreme Ice,” which originally aired
in 2009. The documentary included video
that was awe-inspiring as a testament to the
climate changes taking place.
Balog should be commended for the
lengths to which he goes to tell this impportant story.
Jeff Pelletier ’94
Columbus, Ohio
A NEW PRESCRIPTION

Re “Healthy Regard,” by Zachary Jason
(Fall 2013): Congratulations to Boston
College on the establishment of an interdisciplinary minor in medical humanities. For 10 years the Massachusetts
Foundation for the Humanities has been
promoting the application of literary and
other humanistic perspectives in medical
contexts by sponsoring semester-long literature seminars at hospitals in the Boston

VATICAN II REVISITED

A central theme of my colleague Lisa
Sowle Cahill’s lucid piece (“Being of This
World,” Fall 2013) is one that concerns all
Catholics: how Catholic identity has been
understood since Vatican II.
Cahill sketches a typology of three
approaches to the issue. A first is designated “Augustinian” and is associated with
popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. A
second is termed “neo-Thomist” and is
associated with theologians such as the
Jesuits Karl Rahner and John Courtney
Murray. To these categories, and derived
from other, younger theologians, she adds
a third: “neo-Franciscan.” It prioritizes
“small faith community and personal
devotion and service.”
Professor Cahill suggests an “either/or”
choice among the three, whereas each of
the directions and individuals mentioned
represent, for the most part, a Catholic
“both/and” approach. Often they are
distinguished more by emphasis than by
rejection. Thus there is the real possibil-

ity of fruitful discussion and discernment
among these three approaches.
For such discernment to be both faithful and creative, it must be founded on
the Church’s witness to Jesus Christ. In
this regard Pope Francis’s new Apostolic
Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, (“The Joy
of the Gospel”) can serve as salutary challenge. The pope insists: “By his coming,
Christ brought with him all newness. With
this newness he is always able to renew
our lives and our communities.”
Jesus Christ, Francis continues, can
“break through the dull schemas with
which we would imprison him and he constantly amazes us by his divine creativeness. Each time we return to the source
and recover the original freshness of the
Gospel, new paths open—creative methods, different forms of expression, more
eloquent signs, words filled with renewed
meaning for today’s world.” For Pope
Francis, the true joy of the Gospel is Jesus
himself.
Rev. Robert P. Imbelli
Associate professor of theology, emeritus
Bronx, New York
HISTORY LESSONS

Re “Object lessons,” by Dave Denison
(Fall 2013): As a graduate student of Robin
Fleming’s, I witnessed her vision and energy
at first hand. Professor Fleming’s innovative
approach to interpreting material sources
has transformed historians’ understanding
of the pivotal and transitional post-Roman
period in Britain. Working with someone
willing to embrace evidence that disrupted
the traditional narrative of the Middle
Ages was both challenging and profoundly
inspiring.
Sally Shockro, Ph.D.’08
North Andover, Massachusetts
The author is an assistant professor of history
at Merrimack College.
Professor Fleming is a fiercely original
thinker and an historian of uncommon
compassion whose innovative approach
to the past brings vividly to life the hopes
and sorrows, aches and pains, failures and
triumphs of long-dead people. I witnessed
her turn many an undecided freshman into
a passionate history major and convince
more than one graduate student—myself

included—to embrace the challenges and
rewards of interdisciplinary research.
For those of us fortunate enough to
have worked with her, the MacArthur
Foundation’s “Genius Grant” hardly came
as a surprise.
Austin Mason, Ph.D.’12
Minneapolis, Minnesota
The author is an assistant professor of history
at the University of Minnesota.
GOVERNMENT AGENCY

As I read Zygmunt J. B. Plater’s “Fish Tale”
(Fall 2013), I could not help but notice the
resemblance to a current grassroots movement—the Tea Party—which is an effort
to stand up against expansive and invasive
government. Those who stood up to the
Tennessee Valley Authority were fighting
the same battle.
It was extremely refreshing to see
this piece, which sheds light on an aspect
of the government many seldom see or
acknowledge.
Akash Chougule ’12
East Greenwich, Rhode Island
This story about the overreach of the
federal government for the “common
good”—to the detriment, and over the
protest, of the local people affected—only
to be challenged by a small endangered
fish, is a forecast of what will be written
40-odd years from now about Obamacare
and the federal government forcing us to
do something else for the common good.
Martin Toomey, MBA’66
Kingsland, Georgia

much attention to the ground. As a result,
Worcester Polytechnic Institute wound up
showered with the leaflets that Holy Cross
so richly deserved.
Mike Hirrel ’73
Arlington, Virginia
The story “Nom De Plume” mentions a
Lakota name given to Thomas Gasson,
SJ, in 1909. I was working in the Pine
Ridge and Rosebud communities in South
Dakota in the 1980s when a young Jesuit
friend told me he had been given a name
by the Lakota teenagers he was working
with for the summer. Fr. Gasson’s name
(in current spelling) was Zintkala (bird)
Wankatuya (up high) or High Bird. My
friend’s new name was Zintkala (bird)
Nasula (brain). Because Lakota teenagers
are known for their humor, he knew the
translation was intended.
Jim Green ’68
Wilmot, South Dakota
Clarification In “Agency” (by Ben
Birnbaum, Fall 2013) it was stated that
Max Weber wrote “Bureaucracy” in 1922.
The essay by that title, from Weber’s book
Economy and Society: An Outline of
Interpretive Sociology, was published posthumously. Weber died in 1920. Our thanks to
professor of political science, emeritus, Marvin
Rintala for bringing this to our attention.
BCM welcomes letters from readers.
Letters may be edited for length and clarity,
and must be signed to be published. Our
fax number is (617) 552–2441; our email
address is bcm@bc.edu.

ORAL HISTORY

The attempted aerial bombardment of
Holy Cross with fliers (“Oddities and
Endings: The Spirit is Willing,” Fall 2013)
calls for further explanation. My dad
(Mike Hirrel ’49) told this story many
times, so I think I know it by heart. Dad
was recruited for the mission because he
was a pilot and John Duff ’49 because he
had been a bombardier. But neither of
them had ever been to Worcester, or seen
the College of the Holy Cross, so Dick
Riley ’49, JD’52, was recruited to identify
the target. Riley, unfortunately, had never
been in a plane, much less a small one. He
became quite ill and wasn’t able to pay

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w i n t e r 20 14 v b c m

3

CONTE NT S
6 Shift change

Linden
Lane

Not just another news cycle
8 The problem set

uate math test around
10 Focused group

The Council for Women at 10
11 Cross training

The Xcel retreat for studentathletes
14 Farm hand

Lessons in botany, accounting, and construction at the
Lynch School
15 Advances

From the laboratories

4

bcm v winte r 2014

CAMPUS DIGEST

Taking the hardest undergradCarroll School of Management (CSOM)
faculty member Nicholas Nugent’s international marketing class received some
free promotion when Los Angeles Lakers
star Kobe Bryant dropped in on the opening session of the spring semester. Bryant
(6’6”) stayed through the two-hour class,
then signed autographs and posed for
selfies with students and Nugent (5’10”).
z Theologian and legal scholar Cathleen
Kaveny has joined Boston College as the
Darald and Juliet Libby Professor, with
appointments in the Law School and the
theology department. z The Center for
Retirement Research at Boston College
released a report showing how changes in
social security payment regulations reward
those who work until 70. z In honor of
the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg
Address, students in the history class
“China: Sun Yat-Sen to the Beijing
Olympics” organized a daylong series
of recitations, readings, and reflections
on O’Neill Plaza. z At a weekly papal
audience in St. Peter’s Square, juniors
Katherine Rich and Ethan Mack presented
a zucchetto to Pope Francis who accepted
the skullcap and offered his in return.
z Named to the 2014 U.S. Olympic
women’s hockey team were forward Alex
Carpenter ’15 (profiled in “Fast-break,”
BCM, Fall 2013), forward Kelli Stack ’11,
and goalie Molly Schaus ’11. Pittsburgh
Penguins defenseman Brooks Orpik ’02
was named to the men’s hockey squad. The
White House appointed Caitlin Cahow,
JD’14, who played on two medal-winning

women’s Olympic ice hockey teams, to
its Olympic delegation. z Solomon
Friedberg, the James P. McIntyre Professor
of Mathematics, was named a fellow
of the American Mathematical Society.
Friedberg’s colleague Dawei Chen, assistant professor of mathematics, received
a $429,359 National Science Foundation
junior faculty CAREER award to further
his work on Teichmüller dynamics. z
McElroy Commons chef Marlon Mazier,
a 30-year veteran of Dining Services,
was named cook of the year by the
Massachusetts Restaurant Association.
z For his book Capital, Coercion, and
Postcommunist States (2012) professor
of political science Gerald Easter was
awarded the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize
and the Davis Center Book Prize by the
Association for Slavic, East European,
and Eurasian Studies. z Seventy “ugly
Christmas sweaters” were auctioned
off at the Residence Hall Association’s
Catwalk Christmas gala, raising more
than $900 for the Boston Rescue Mission.
The sweaters have not been sighted since.
z A student was arrested and charged
after admitting to setting fires in Gasson
Hall and Stokes Hall on November 9. z
In September the Law School will open
the Center for Experiential Learning, a
“law firm within a law school,” as part
of an effort to expand hands-on training
opportunities for students. z Having
received A-plus scores for teaching-quality
and curriculum, the CSOM’s part-time
MBA program jumped 21 positions to

hizzoner—At a ceremony held in Conte Forum on January 6, Martin Walsh, a 2010 graduate of the University’s Woods College of Advancing Studies,
became Boston’s 48th mayor. As he took the stage, he was greeted by (from left) University President William P. Leahy, SJ; Cardinal Seán O’Malley,
OFM, Cap.; U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren; and Governor Deval Patrick. Some 8,000 people attended the inauguration, at which cellist Yo-Yo Ma and
students from the Boston Arts Academy performed. In opening remarks, Fr. Leahy noted the University’s long “partnership” with the city.

32nd place in the Bloomberg Businessweek
biennial rankings. z For the third year
in a row, the Heights won a Pacemaker
Award for overall excellence in collegiate
journalism. z Schiller Family Head
Hockey Coach Jerry York ’67, M.Ed.’70,
agreed to a contract extension through
the 2019–20 season. York is in his 20th
year as head coach and has led the Eagles
to four national championships and nine
Hockey East tournament titles. z Lynch
School of Education professor Jacqueline
Lerner received a $1.9 million grant from
the John Templeton Foundation to support a three-year study of moral development among youths. z At the inaugural
Intercollegiate Irish Dance Festival, held
at Villanova University, Boston College
students took first and second place in the
four-hand competition, the top three placphotograph: Lee Pellegrini

es in eight-hand competition, second and
fifth in the treble reel, and third in the “fun
number” category. z Tigard, Oregon,
native and international studies major
Narintohn Luangrath ’14 was named
one of two winners of an undergraduate research award from the Forum on
Education Abroad, recognizing her study
of the treatment of asylum-seekers while
an intern with the Irish Human Rights
Commission. z Jonathan Reuter, an
assistant professor of finance, received a
TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for
his work on life annuities. z According
to the University’s Equity in Athletics
Data Report, 2012–13 profits for men’s
and women’s basketball and men’s hockey
teams increased over the previous year,
while football profits slipped. The gap
in aid for male (336) and female (360)

student-athletes widened, with men receiving an average of some $27,000 in aid
and women receiving $20,500. z At the
2014 Golden Globe Awards ceremony,
CSOM alumnus Chris O’Donnell ’92
presented the award for lead actress in
a comedy series (Parks and Recreation)
to Amy Poehler ’93, who co-hosted the
event with Tina Fey. z The University
established BC Recovery Housing, a program that supports students dealing with
addictions. z As part of its Recipe Box
Project, the Boston Globe selected a recipe
for cranberry-orange scones from Kay
Schlozman, J. Joseph Moakley Professor
of Political Science, who reported that in
2013, “I got up at 5 a.m. and made several
batches as a Valentine’s Day celebration
for the undergraduates in my 9 a.m. political science course.”
—Thomas Cooper
w i n t e r 20 14 v b c m

5

minutes had built the sports section’s front
page. Over the next two hours she would
do the same with the news, metro (the
paper covers Boston-area happenings) arts,
and opinions editors.

t’s Shadow Night in McElroy 113,
the cluttered, cramped, no-points-forstyle headquarters of the Heights biweekly
student newspaper. Toward the end of
every fall, after a year in charge, the 10
members of the business board and 29
members of the editorial board, including the editor in chief, vote in a new team
to run the paper. Some 30 staff writers,
photographers, and graphic designers
vying for the open positions have one
day—Wednesday, November 20, this past
year—to shadow the outgoing editors and
learn the ropes of the unpaid work they
seek, as the current staff produces its penultimate (and 48th) issue. Boston College
Magazine shadowed too.
wednesday, 11:54 a.m. Between
classes, sports editor Austin Tedesco ’15
arrived in the big basement room the
Heights has occupied the past 41 of its
94 years. Dorm-style wooden desks with
decade-old computers abut the office’s

6

bcm v winte r 2014

cement walls, which are decorated with
framed back issues, an Edgar Allan Poe
mask, a Frozen Four press pass from
2012, and snapshots of former editors.
Tennis balls, philosophy books (property
of the staff’s several philosophy majors),
and crumpled copy paper litter the gray
wall-to-wall carpet.
Tedesco was there to work with layout
editor Lindsay Grossman ’14 on his lead
story—an analysis of football defensive
coordinator Don Brown’s blitz-heavy tactics. Grossman, who has designed more
than 1,000 pages since joining the paper
her freshman year, quickly sifted through
hundreds of staff photographs to find a
portrait of Brown shouting from the sideline with his hand cupped over his mouth
and nose, and muttered, “Hmm?” “That’s
it,” Tedesco replied. “And there’s our headline: ‘Hard-nosed’.” Grossman cropped the
photo, created an infographic of defensiveteam statistics, constructed silhouettes
of two defensive players, and within 30

1:14 p.m. A few staffers arrived to begin
their tutorials. Some Heights members
envision careers as professional journalists,
but most join with more immediate goals.
Pat Coyne ’16, an international studies
major, said he was running for associate
editor of the sports section to ease the
transition from being a “two-sport athlete
in high school to not being involved in
sports at all.” English and political science major Nathan McGuire ’16, a recent
transfer from Providence College, said
he wanted to join the news team because
“you’re always immersed in the school’s
happenings, always talking to people.”
News editor Eleanor Hildebrandt ’15
said she first avoided news for exactly
that reason. As a shy freshman she was
elected copy editor, “where you only have
to talk to people when they’re wrong.”
But over time she has taken on writing
assignments, drawn by the tightrope walk
of “compressing a two-hour event or fiv
interviews into 500 words.”
2:41 Arts editor Sean Keeley ’15 placed
a page of album reviews on the “copy
couch”—a worn blue sectional—for
proofreading. Lacking desks, copy editors
Kendra Kumor ’16, Connor Farley ’16,
and Connor Mellas ’15 have regularly
staked out this piece of furniture (also
the preferred spot to do homework). By
Kumor’s reckoning, they have read 1.8
million words of Heights prose thus far
in 2013.
4:32 “Emergency e-board meeting,”
announced opinions editor Mary Rose
Fissinger ’15. The editorial board holds
planning meetings each Monday night and
Friday morning, but when editors receive
newsworthy information in the middle
of production, the 16 members huddle in
the 50-square-foot office of editor in chief
David Cote ’14.
“We need to say something about
the Campus School,” Fissinger said. The
University had announced that the private school for disabled children housed

photograph: Caitlin Cunningham

in Campion Hall was considering a
relocation to the Kennedy Day School at
Franciscan Hospital for Children in nearby Brighton. Some 1,750 Boston College
undergraduates and local citizens had
signed a petition earlier in the day urging
the University not to close the Campus
School.
For 20 minutes, the editors bounced
around ideas on the subject. Fissinger took
notes on a laptop and then asked for a volunteer to write the editorial. Hildebrandt
took the assignment. The printed article
would say the petition was “based on emotions rather than facts” and would call for
a town-hall discussion.
5:03 Thirteen boxes of pizza arrived,
courtesy of a longstanding arrangement
with Roggie’s in Cleveland Circle. In
exchange for free pies each Wednesday,
the Heights places an eighth-page ad for
the restaurant in nearly every other issue.
Some 45 students were in the newsroom
at this point—those who couldn’t find a
seat on a swivel chair or the couch stood
and ate as they read copy.
7:30 Cote received his first page of the
night to review, from the arts section
called The Scene. He scribbled sparingly
with his green pen—transposing a sentence here and there and simply writing
“CBB” (“could be better”) over a couple of
headlines. An editor of the section entered
Cote’s changes, posted the corrected copy
online, and handed in a printout to Joe
Castlen ’15, the managing editor.
Cote is a jocund pre-med student who
often leaves his office to banter with the
editors. When he edits, he said, he checks
for clarity and above all fairness. “We’re
independent. We could write whatever we
want. But every editor goes to school here,
and lives here. We’re not going to make
waves unless it’s necessary.”
After he initialed the page, Cote called
in Fissinger, Hildebrandt, and Tedesco to
proofread it, as well. In addition to overseeing their sections, they were shadowing
him for the evening, in hopes of succeeding him as editor.
“It’s tense in here,” said Tedesco.
“But we’ve worked with each other for
two years. We know the paper is in good
hands whichever way.”

8:52 When Fissinger had finished marking up Hildebrandt’s opinion on the
Campus School and Tedesco’s editorial
suggesting that Athletics host a winter pep
rally, she called out, “Editorials are in.”
All board members opened their laptops
and began reviewing the page in a shared
Google Doc, the black text becoming
streaked with green, pink, blue, and yellow
as editors entered their comments. “We
try to have the editorial page represent the
opinions of every editor,” said Fissinger,
who reworked the pieces and passed the
page to Cote for approval.
9:18 Freshman Mike Hoff emailed his
hockey write-up to Tedesco five minutes
after the game ended. As the Eagles took
a 5–0 lead in the third period, Hoff typed
the story on his iPhone.
10:24 Hildebrandt texted a writer who
was hours past deadline, and soon received
her story. Hildebrandt told her trainees
what to look for in a first read: “Is it on
topic? Are there redundancies? Is there
any semblance of opinion?” She deleted a
sentence that began, “As Eagles, we can all
agree that. . . .” Throughout the newsroom,
other editors were giving similar advice to
other clusters of candidates.
11:05 The newsroom emptied as the editors walked upstairs to Carney’s
dining hall to refuel on nachos, French

fries, and frozen yogurt—a tradition at
11:05 on every production-night.
thursday, 1:15 a.m. After metro editors Tricia Tiedt ’15 and Ryan Towey ’16
handed in their final pages of the year, fellow editors applauded and hugged them.
The editors did the same when the arts
section closed soon after.
1:42 News candidate McGuire cut the
campus police report to fit the available
space. A dozen editors and a couple of
staffers remained on the job in McElroy
113. DJs were spinning records in the
WZBC studio down the hall. The student
step team had just finished practice one
floor above. Relative silence descended.
2:51 Hildebrandt submitted the issue’s final
page—the front page—to managing editor
Castlen. He read it one last time, deleted
one comma (with Hildebrandt’s concurrence), and then called the Boston Globe,
whose presses are employed to print the
student paper.
“Hi, it’s Joe from the Heights. We’re
good to go,” he said, as Cote, Fissinger,
Hildebrandt, Grossman, and Tedesco
stood around his desk.
“Thanks. We’ll talk to you next week,”
said a voice at the other end of the phone.
After he hung up, Castlen said,
“No, I guess not. They’ll be talking to
someone else.” n

It’s a wrap
On November 13, a crowd of some 200 historians, legal
scholars, sociologists, educators, journalists, and theologians, including men in clerical collars and women
in Muslim headscarves, filled the Heights Room
in Corcoran Commons. They were there for a daylong symposium titled “Religious Diversity and the
Common Good,” organized by the Boisi Center for
Religion and American Public Life—the last of six academic conferences over the past year marking the 150th
anniversary of the founding of Boston College. Following sessions on historical patterns and current initiatives, Washington Post columnist and
Georgetown University scholar E.J. Dionne delivered the closing talk, on political
aspects of religious diversity. The University’s Sesquicentennial celebration, which
began with a Mass at Fenway Park on September 15, 2012, concluded December
12, 2013, with a Mass in St. Ignatius Church.

w i n t e r 20 14 v b c m

7

With 17 days until the Putnam exam, a practice session in Carney 309.

The problem set
By Toby Lester

Taking the hardest undergraduate math test around

M

ost Wednesdays this past fall, if you
happened to wander past Carney
309 late in the afternoon, as the daylight
dwindled, you would have seen a small
group of students and faculty staring at a
blackboard strewn with equations. Chances
are you would have found them sitting
in a companionable silence, each lost in a
private fog of thought—which is to say,
you would have seen the Boston College
Problem Group in action, preparing for the
toughest and most prestigious undergraduate mathematical contest in the world.
It’s called the Putnam Competition.
Endowed by Elizabeth Lowell Putnam
in 1927, in honor of her late husband,
William, a lawyer, the competition was
launched in its present form in 1938.
It’s been an annual event ever since,
designed “to stimulate a healthy rivalry
in mathematical studies in the colleges
and universities of the United States and
Canada,” according to the Mathematical
Association of America, which has run

8

bcm v winte r 2014

the competition since its inception. Each
year some 5,000 students take part, sitting
in early December for an exam administered simultaneously on campuses all over
North America.
It’s a legendarily difficult competition.
The winners have almost always been students from Harvard, MIT, and a few other
math powerhouses. Two of them, including
theoretical physicist Richard Feynman,
have gone on to win Nobel Prizes. Students
enter the competition as individuals, but
each institution can also nominate a team
of three to represent it. Prizes are awarded
to individuals and to teams, whose individual scores are added together. The exam
itself takes all day. Students have three
hours in the morning to solve six problems,
and three hours in the afternoon to solve
six more. Each is worth 10 points, for a
total of 120. And here’s a sobering fact:
Each year, when the results of the exam are
ranked from best to worst, invariably the
median score is . . . zero.

Let that sink in for a minute. Each year
5,000 of the very best collegiate mathematicians in the United States and Canada
take the Putnam exam, and at least half of
them don’t score a single point.
Max Jackson ’14, from Granby,
Connecticut, is a two-time member of that
club. Max took the test as a sophomore
and a junior, and each time scored a zero.
Aware that this would be his last chance to
compete, he carved time out of a busy premed schedule to attend as many Problem
Group sessions as he could. Not that
he harbored illusions about becoming a
contender. Just scoring points, any points,
would represent a triumph. “It’s a personal
challenge, like when I ran the marathon,”
he said after a November practice session.
“These problems are some of the hardest
problems I’ve ever seen, that most people
will ever see in their mathematical careers.
I’m not trying to win. I’m just fighting to
get into that top 50 percent.”
Throughout the fall semester, along
with a handful of other Problem Group
regulars, Max did battle on Wednesdays
with sample Putnam questions (see box).
At one session, thinking he’d figure
something out, he got to his feet, mumbled
something about slope as a constant, and
shuffled to the front of the class, where he
began transferring notes to the blackboard.
He started out confidently enough, but
within a minute or so he had to stop. He
stepped back and reviewed what he’d written on the board. Something wasn’t right.
After a while, Maksym Fedorchuk, one
of two young assistant professors who
helped run the practice sessions, spoke up.
“Max,” he said, “are you trying to get your
hands on a second derivative?”
“I’m trying to get . . .” Max’s sentence
trailed off into thought, and then he
tapped his chalk on an equation. “I think
this is where I messed up,” he said.
Radu Cebanu, the other young professor, nudged Max toward a solution. “The
problem,” he reminded him, “only says
that slope is periodic.”
This helped Max, who brightened and
said, “Then I guess you’d have to go down
to the second derivative to get that.”
“Right,” said William Keane, the
assistant chair of the mathematics
department. “I think the second derivative is the way to go.”

photograph: Lee Pellegrini

Short, bearded, and a model of softspoken professorial geniality, Keane was
sitting off to the side of the blackboard.
Above him, on the wall, hung a framed
Renaissance portrait of Pythagoras, who
looked a little vexed himself by the problem on the board. Keane has taught at
Boston College for 36 years, has served
as the University’s Putnam liaison for 16
of them, and took the test himself as a college student, all of which means he knows
better than anybody the odds the students
are up against. “Winning the Putnam isn’t
realistic,” he said when the exam was
just a few weeks away. “But preparing
for it for months really improves your
mathematical acuity. These aren’t the
kinds of problems you look at and say, ‘I
know how to do that.’ They almost always
require you to think across boundaries,
to search for connections and patterns.
That’s the fun of it: when you see patterns
emerge and then can leap from them to
others. That’s beautiful mathematics.”

problem: Courtesy of American Mathematical Monthly

The six students who turned up at
Carney 309 on the morning of Saturday,
December 7, to take the Putnam exam
weren’t really concerned with doing beautiful math. They just wanted to score some
points, elegantly or not. The official team
consisted of Stephanie Ger ’14, Tianyu
Xiang ’15, and Jing Xu ’16; they were
joined by Max Jackson, Zachary Skarka
’15, and Christopher Coscia ’15, who
were competing individually.
Max’s strategy—everybody’s strategy,
really—was simple: Scan all six problems,
locate one or two that seem doable, and
then spend the full three hours attacking
just those.
The first session wrapped up at 1:00,
at which point the whole group headed
out for a lunch at Union Street, in Newton
Centre—a math-department tradition on
Putnam exam day. College-football games
flickered on flat-screen TVs around the
room, but the group ignored them entirely, instead chattering abstrusely about the

problems they’d just been grappling with.
The mood was surprisingly lively and
upbeat. “They all thought they got at least
one,” Professor Keane later reported. “But
I’ve learned to wait and see.”
After lunch, the group headed back
to Carney 309, and at 3:00 on the dot
launched into the afternoon’s problems.
Three hours later, Professor Keane collected the exams, and it was all over. Some of
the students began checking their mobile
devices, to consult the solutions already
being posted online after the exam by testtakers around the country. But not Max.
Poking around online, he decided, might
make him feel worse rather than better
about how he’d done. All things considered, he felt pretty good, so he figured he’d
just wait for the official results, which will
be announced in the spring. “I definitely
have a shot,” he said. “I suppose we’ll see
in March.” n
Toby Lester is a writer in the Boston area.

n a chilly Thursday evening in late
October, nearly 300 alumnae gathered at the W Hotel in New York City
for a sold-out presentation by New York
Times best-selling author Gretchen Rubin
titled, “Happiness beyond the Heights.”
The evening marked a high point in a year
of events celebrating the 10th anniversary
of the Council for Women of Boston
College (CWBC). “It’s official—this is
the largest-ever gathering of BC alumnae,” announced CWBC chair, founding
member, and chair of the Boston College
Board of Trustees Kathleen McGillycuddy
NC’71, to cheers from the audience.
The CWBC was founded by the
University in 2002 with a six-woman
executive committee and a mission to
increase the involvement of alumnae in
Boston College. From providing mentors
to female students and graduates to organizing volunteer service activities to sponsoring lectures and symposia on issues of
importance to women, the CWBC aims to

10

bcm v winter 2 0 14

strengthen the bonds between alumnae and
the University.
In an interview this winter, Mary
Lou DeLong NC’71, former University
secretary and senior vice president and a
CWBC founder, described the impetus
for starting the organization. Surveys
by the University, she said, showed that
alumnae wanted to be more involved in
Boston College, but that “they didn’t quite
know how to do so.” In 2002, with women
amounting to 52 percent of undergraduates—the figure is now 53 percent—the
challenge, said DeLong, was to find ways
“to engage different segments of that
female population.” (It is worth noting
that, 44 years after women were admitted to the University’s largest school—the
College of Arts and Sciences—in 1970,
women account for 15 of 54 members of
the Board of Trustees.)
Gretchen Rubin’s talk on the art and
science of happiness, preceded by cocktails and many high-volume reunions of

classmates, was a festive coda to a day of
business. During an afternoon meeting
attended by 70 council members from
around the country, the agenda included
updates from subcommittees on member
recruitment and a tribute to council member Margaret Darby ’82, who died June 16,
2013. The centerpiece was the unveiling of
a major new initiative—announced jointly
by McGillycuddy, Arts and Sciences dean
David Quigley, and Beth McDermott, an
associate vice president for development.
The goal, McGillycuddy told the council,
is to raise $5 million over five years to
fund a new, permanent program at Boston
College, the CWBC Colloquium.
The colloquium McGillycuddy
described would bring prominent women
from all fields to the Heights for conversations about women and leadership, and
“permanently influence the dialogue about
women at BC.” While acknowledging
that the fundraising goal was “aggressive,” McGillycuddy said, “the colloquium
captures the essence of our mission, and
offers . . . the kind of permanency that
we’ve all sought.”
“What I find especially remarkable
about the council and its activities over
the last 10 years,” said Quigley in his comments, “is this insistent drive . . . to imagine the BC we want to build.” Within the
Jesuit tradition, he acknowledged, “there
has not been much of a place for serious,
sustained discussion of women and leadership, of the possibilities for women in
public and private life, and we need to take
this seriously.” The CWBC Colloquium,
said Quigley, will be a high-profile forum
compelling the University’s attention
to “where we’re not hitting the mark on
issues of women’s leadership.”
the core of the cwbc is the council,
148 elected women—among them attorneys, physicians, educators, bankers, and
entrepreneurs—who agree to commit
time, expertise, and finances to further the
involvement of alumnae and to advance
the University’s overall mission. In 2006,
the group added an associate level of
membership, which now includes some
890 women. In return for invitations to
CWBC events, associate members act
as ambassadors for the organization at
University events, participate in pro-

photograph: Rose Lincoln

grams—as panelists, for example—and
support the University with an annual
gift. To attract alumnae of all ages, the
CWBC offers several thematic programs.
Its Journey series (subtitled “Paths to
Success and Fulfillment”), for instance,
annually presents four events—including
“Preparing for the Journey,” for undergraduates, and “Refining the Journey,”
for alumnae in mid-life—in venues from
Boston to San Francisco.
On May 14, 2013, the concluding
segment of the Journey series, “Refining
the Journey: Aging Reimagined,” drew
167 alumnae and friends, most of them
middle age or older, to the Cadigan
Alumni Center. Streamed live to a CWBC
group in Chicago, the four presentations,
including a keynote address by Joseph
F. Coughlin, director of MIT’s AgeLab,
covered issues from high-tech innovations
in elder care—such as implantable sensors to measure vital signs—to advice on
how to have difficult conversations relating to end-of-life care. “So many things
geared for older people are selling you
something,” said Fran Mervyn, Ph.D.’78,
who at age 75 serves as dean of students at
the Massachusetts School of Professional
Psychology in Newton. “This,” she said,
“was very good information.”
The CWBC is “constantly tweaking”
its programming, DeLong says, looking
for new ways to bring alumnae together
and engage them with the University. The
strategy involves starting early. The council has established an advisory Board of
25 undergraduates and works with faculty
and staff of the University’s four schools
to develop programs such as Career
Explorations, through which students visit
companies where council members work.
The Council on the Road initiative engages members around the country through
events such as museum receptions. And
the CWBC online Prayer Group provides
a way for members to connect spiritually
and offer mutual support. Since its founding, the CWBC has organized more than
300 events, with a total attendance of
some 20,000 students and graduates.
council member nicole deblois
’99, vice president for business development at Boston Financial Data Services,
was one of two speakers at a “Beginning

the Journey” presentation at the Liberty
Hotel in Boston on the evening of
December 3, a sold-out event that drew
100 mostly gold (graduates of the last
decade) alumnae. Subtitled “Lean on Me,”
the discussion, moderated by nonprofi
director, attorney, and council member
Jean Kane ’83, focused on issues of
women’s empowerment in the workplace
raised by former Facebook COO Sheryl
Sandberg’s 2013 book, Lean In: Women,
Work, and the Will to Lead. With fellow panelist and executive coach Kim Meninger
’97, MBA’08, DeBlois encouraged the
attendees to be confident of their worth. “If
you’re invited to a meeting, you’re meant
to be there,” she said. “Don’t be shy about
taking your seat.”
A former forward on the women’s ice
hockey team, DeBlois co-leads the CWBC
Athletics Initiatives Committee, which aims
to raise the public profile of the University’s
women’s athletic program. In its first 10
years, says DeBlois, the CWBC has “built
a solid foundation and great programs.”
But the major question is one of scale. With
80,000 alumnae, she says, the challenge is
“to reach as many women as possible.”

Some of those women will be first-ti ers at a Journey presentation, as was associate member Meghan Lane ’06, a private
banker at J.P. Morgan in Boston. Working
in a male-dominated industry, Lane said,
she had missed the opportunity to build “a
strong coalition of women.” “When you’re
hitting your stride with your career and
you face big family choices,” she says, “it’s
important to hear from women who’ve
been able to balance it all.”
Few if any CWBC members would
claim to hit that mark all the time, but
there is a readiness among them to share
what they have learned about education, career, family, health, faith, and
life’s other challenges. That propensity is one of the major resources the
council will draw on as, in the words of
McGillycuddy, its members work to help
alumnae “establish a lifelong relationship
with the University.” n
Jane Whitehead is a Boston-based writer.
To view a video celebrating CWBC’s
10 years, go to Full Story at www.
bc.edu/bcm.

Cross training
By William Bole

The Xcel retreat for student-athletes

T

wo years ago, Alison Quandt
’06, MBA’11, director of Boston
College’s Student-Athlete Development
Program, was reflecting on aspects of
the Boston College experience that often
elude the University’s 700 varsity athletes,
and especially on her mind was: reflection.
While these students have little time to
participate in retreats and similar programs because of seasonal schedules and
training regimens, they do have the same
need as other students to think deeply
about their present and future. As Quandt,
who broke several Boston College records

on the ice as a goalie and whose first team
after graduation was the risk assurance
group at PricewaterhouseCoopers, has
observed, most undergraduates who play
varsity sports “want to be professional
athletes. Most are going pro in something
other than sports.”
Quandt put in a call to Michael Sacco,
director of the University’s Center for
Student Formation, which sponsors
programs throughout the academic
year (including the off-campus Halftime
retreats for sophomores, juniors, and
seniors) designed to help students discern

their priorities and paths in life. They talked about drawing student-athletes out of
what Sacco calls “the Conte bubble,” referring to Conte Forum, where many not only
play their games but also go to team meetings, do their weight training, and carry
on various other sport-related activities.
Out of those conversations came a threeday program, dubbed Xcel, which brings
together captains and other players being
groomed for leadership on their teams.
“There’s a gap between athletes and the
rest of the University, and we could do a
better job of closing the gap,” says Quandt,
referring to signature Boston College
experiences such as service to others in
addition to retreat offerings. The challenge
is hardly unique to Boston College. Many
universities have responded by setting up
student-athlete development offices like
the one at Boston College, which debuted
in 2010 and helps these students navigate
academic and non-academic aspects of
undergraduate life. At Boston College,
involving student-athletes in retreats is
the latest thrust. Quandt’s office has also
designed service activities, including an
annual student-athlete immersion trip to
New Orleans in January to help build lowincome homes.
on a friday evening in early december, 33 student-athletes assembled for a
weekend at a secluded camp and confer-

12

bcm v winter 2 0 14

ence center in Groton, Massachusetts.
The 13 men and 20 women—from the
University’s sailing, track, soccer, rowing,
golf, tennis, lacrosse, field hockey, volleyball, softball, and baseball teams—would
hear from Campus Ministry professionals and alumni athletes, as well as
Boston College’s athletic director, Brad
Bates (whose closing remarks on Sunday
focused on an ethical question involving
New York Yankees captain Derek Jeter
and a controversial 2010 bit of drama at
home plate against Tampa Bay). During
the weekend there would also be games,
including late-night rounds of “Conte
Jeopardy” with trivia questions tied to
Boston College sports figures and teams.
This would mark the program’s second Xcel weekend. The first was held the
previous December; another, planned for
the weekend of April 19, 2013, did not
materialize because of the lockdown of
Boston following the Boston Marathon
bombings. Quandt said football captains
would have attended this recent gathering
if their team had not won a bowl berth,
lengthening their season. They’ll get
another chance. She expects the winter
teams, including ice hockey and basketball,
to send players to an Xcel weekend being
planned for spring.
Student-athletes on retreat are not
altogether like other students who avail
themselves of this opportunity. Sacco says

that at other retreats, he and the studentformation staff practically have to pull
participants out of bed, for breakfast. At
this retreat many were up at around 6:00
a.m. for workouts, and—indicative of the
punctuality demanded of them by their
sport—were seated in the dining hall at
least five minutes early. The only ones
almost arriving late for Saturday’s 9:00
breakfast were two members of the women’s track team who had ventured beyond
the 250 wooded acres of Grotonwood,
the ecumenical Christian center that hosted the group. The runners logged about
20 miles and got lost before finding their
way back.
The program that morning began in
a small, ranch-style lodge, with remarks
by Fr. Tony Pena, who directs Campus
Ministry and serves as chaplain to the
men’s hockey team. Pena had spoken
there the night before, as well. “I presume
most of you didn’t come on your own,” he
had said Friday evening, eliciting chuckles from the students who sat in three
rows across a low-ceilinged camp meeting room with foosball and air-hockey
tables in the back. “You were nudged a
little to come here.” (They were indeed
assigned by their coaches to attend the
retreat.) Pena was referencing the title of
a 2008 book by economist Richard Thaler
and legal scholar Cass Sunstein, Nudge:
Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth,
and Happiness.
Back in the meeting room on Saturday
morning, the priest, in blue jeans and a
maroon-and-gold sweatshirt, resumed
his blend of motivational speaking and
homiletics.
“I’m psyched to be here again with you,”
he said with an easy smile, standing in front
of an old red-brick fireplace and alongside
an easel pad. With his pen he drew a square
on the surface and identified its peripheries
as the “marshmallow” regions, representing “all the unimportant things” in life that
call for “a lot of give and compromise.”
Then he sketched a smaller square at the
center of the figure—symbolizing what he
described as a person’s “core.”
In need of a livelier prop, he called
up to the front a tall young man sporting a light-gray ski hat and a chin beard.
Pointing to the area of his heart, the
speaker asked him, “What is your core

photograph: Caitlin Cunningham

value?” The student replied in an instant,
“Family.”
“What else?” Pena asked.
“Commitment.”
“Give me a third one.”
“Competition.”
Bringing his hand closer to the student’s gut, Pena added, “I can feel it.
You’re not a marshmallow.” Later on,
the student—Giuliano Frano, a soccer
player from Toronto and a junior majoring in finance—said in an interview that
he was quick on the uptake partly because
of a 20-minute reflection exercise the
night before. Students were handed
envelopes containing 50 tiny segments of
paper, with a personal value written on
each one (for example, “Appreciation,”
“Honesty,” “Loyalty,” “Communication,”
“Friendship”); in a few rounds they had to
winnow the batch to three core values of
their own.
After Pena’s inspirations, five folding chairs were arrayed in front of the
fireplace for a panel of alumni athletes.
Quandt made the introductions and read
them their charge: “Think of a moment in
your undergraduate or professional life
when you had enough courage to make
a tough decision, and—despite doubts,
fears, and pressures—it was the best decision for you.”
Tim Bulman ’05, who is built like the
defensive lineman he used to be, spoke of
his seven-year National Football League
career that included five seasons with the
Houston Texans before he was let go by
that team and then by the New England
Patriots, with whom he trained during
the 2012 summer. “Football came to an
end without my wanting it to,” Bulman
said frankly. Turning aside thoughts of
trying to prolong his football journey,
he decided to make a fresh start with
help from friends and Boston College’s
Career Center. Bulman now runs his own
commercial real estate firm in Boston.
The story told by Amy Cebulski ’05
had less to do with athletics than academics. A pole-vault competitor on the
women’s track team, she entered the
Carroll School of Management with the
full expectation of family and friends that
the high-achieving young woman would
one day become a “rich business person.”
In her first semester she took a statistics

photograph: Lee Pellegrini

course taught by a professor known
for his engaging lecture style. “I was so
bored,” said Cebulski, who has shoulderlength black hair and a friendly, sympathetic manner. Meantime, she found
her anatomy class absorbing and began
picturing herself as a nurse—an idea
strongly discouraged by everyone she
knew, including her mother, who recalled
for argument’s sake the time Cebulski
fainted after donating blood. Today, with
two degrees from the Connell School
of Nursing, including a master’s (2010),
she is a nurse practitioner at the DanaFarber Cancer Institute, acting on what
she came to realize were her strongest
instincts of caring and empathy. Cebulski
gently suggested that students puzzle out
“who we are” before deciding on “what
we should do.”
Other presenters included Jason
Delaney ’05, a management consultant
with PricewaterhouseCoopers and an
outfielder who reached Triple-A baseball
in 2008, before grappling with a decision of the kind Bulman made; Kristen
Madden Lauze ’06, a CPA with a Boston
investment firm (and three-time AllAmerican honoree in field hockey), who

spoke of leaving a more high-powered
position in Manhattan to be closer to
friends and family in New England; and
Matthew Greene ’08, an investment
representative at Fidelity who talked
about the importance of grasping one’s
strengths and weaknesses, something
he learned while playing on Boston
College’s 2008 championship hockey
team.
During the Q&A, Kellie Barnum, a
junior from southern California who is
captain of the volleyball team, asked a
question that wound up occupying most
of that segment. A finance major with a
minor in philosophy, she asked the panel
members: “Is there something you would
do differently” if starting all over as
student-athletes? The alumni responded
practically in unison: “I’d really try to
challenge myself to get to know nonstudent-athletes” (Lauze); “If I could go
back, I’d immerse myself more in the
culture of BC” (Bulman); “Engage your
mind in different things” (Cebulski);
“Try out new stuff” (Delaney).
Echoing the others, Greene added:
“Be curious. Ask questions. Don’t live in
a bubble.” n

In a rush
On December 12, at ESPN’s Home Depot College
Football Awards Show, senior Andre Williams was
named the recipient of the 2013 Doak Walker
Award, given to the nation’s top running back.
Williams ran for 2,177 yards in his final season, a
Boston College record and the fifth highest total
in college football history, and he led the nation in
most rushing categories, including attempts (355),
yards per game (167.5), and 200-yard games (five).
The award recognizes a player’s accomplishments
not only on the field but also academically and
in the community. Williams, an applied psychology and human development major in the Lynch
School of Education, served as a teaching assistant
in a Mission and Ministry Cornerstone seminar for
freshmen, was a member of the University’s pen pal program, which pairs athletes
with local elementary school students, and is at work on a semi-autobiographical novel. A Pennsylvania native, he was voted one of six finalists for the 2013
Heisman Memorial Trophy and was unanimously named a first-team All-American
by the Associated Press, the Football Writers Association of America, Sporting
News, and the Walter Camp Football Foundation. He graduated from Boston
College in December, three and a half years after matriculating. —Thomas Cooper

w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

13

Barnett, in the greenhouse adjacent to Connolly House.

Farm hand
By Zachary Jason

Lessons in botany, business, and construction at the Lynch School

I

n 2013, G. Michael Barnett called the
Drug Enforcement Agency and local
police with a proposition: He would use
confiscated marijuana-growing equipment
to improve Boston public high school students’ STEM skills (in science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics) by teaching
the youths hydroponics—soilless farming.
After confirming that he was indeed an
associate professor of science education
and technology in the Lynch School of
Education (LSOE) and that his hydroponics program was already two years along,
the agencies provided Barnett with lights,
nutrient solutions, and other supplies.
Barnett’s lessons started in 2011 with
eight teenagers as part of College Bound,
LSOE’s mentorship and academic
enrichment program for underprivileged
students. Last July, the National Science
Foundation (NSF) awarded him $1.2 million to expand his project to thousands of
urban high school students through the
training of teachers in area schools.

14

bcm v winter 2 0 14

Of College Bound, Barnett says, “We
look for students who might otherwise
slide through high school without knowing they can excel.” He is in his Campion
Hall office, where columns of lettuce and
bok choy grow under blue and red LED
lighting on his windowsill. Since 2011,
Barnett and LSOE director of urban outreach initiatives Catherine Wong have
admitted some 120 C-level students to
the program’s hydroponics track, virtually
all from households without a collegeeducated parent. Throughout the academic year, they spend every other Saturday
at the 450-square-foot nursery adjacent to
Connolly House on Upper Campus. They
are joined by several undergraduates,
Lynch School Ph.D. students, local high
school science teachers, and Barnett.
New students are banded into small
teams, which receive $250 to purchase
all the components of a hydroponic garden. (“Limits—that’s where creativity
happens,” Barnett says.) They research

designs online, shop at Home Depot,
construct the systems (usually with PVC
piping), and plant crops of their choosing, including dill, eggplant, Thai basil,
and kale. Many seedlings die.
“We want our kids to fail a little,”
Barnett says. “Many of the students have
been immersed in a system where the
expectation is that they’re not going to
do well. We try to shift that expectation,
where failure is a natural part of the process of exploring something.” Every high
school student who has graduated from
the project is now in college; more than
65 percent have entered a STEM field.
With the 2013 grant, Barnett and his
team—Wong, LSOE professor of counseling psychology David Blustein, and
Elizabeth Bagnani, a lecturer in accounting
at the Carroll School of Management—
are developing hydroponics programs at
20 Boston public schools. Solar panels and
windmills are included in the grant, as are
supplies for aquaponics (to convert fis
waste into plant nutrients).
The students, Barnett says, will “tackle
many problems for the first time. What
angles do we need to drill for the water to
flow right? How can we use LED lighting
cost-effectively? What does the power
distribution curve of the solar panel look
like over time? . . . It’s a great way of getting students to ask questions that they
can answer.” As their crops mature, current students meet with farmers in the
region to learn pricing strategies, advertise on Facebook, and run a produce stand
at a farmers market in Boston.
Basic STEM education was not
Barnett’s first calling. In 1999, he was a
fourth-year Ph.D. student in astrophysics at Indiana University, when he was
asked to teach local fifth graders about
the moon. He enjoyed the challenge of
presenting the science without “reducing
the content,” and switched to a program
in instructional systems technology with
a concentration in science education. He
joined the Lynch School in 2003.
Starting in March, Barnett will
help College Bound students farm a
5,000-square-foot greenhouse in suburban Weston. The goal is to grow enough
produce to provide fruits and vegetables
to 500 low-income households. n

photograph: Caitlin Cunningham

Advances

Shell games

Retroviruses, the family of viruses that includes HIV, are notorious for their fast
evolution. But while these viruses have been evolving for millions of years, their
hosts have been changing in response. Welkin Johnson, associate professor
of biology at Boston College, studies one such change in hosts: the evolution
of Trim5, a protein found in humans and rhesus monkeys that can sometimes
block retrovirus infection. The protein works by recognizing parts of an invading virus’s outer shell, attaching itself to the shell and
preventing the virus from reproducing. A report of research conducted in Johnson’s Viruses, Genes, and Evolution Laboratory in Higgins Hall was published in the May 2013 edition of PLOS Pathogens.
Rhesus monkeys have three versions of the Trim5 protein that protect against different retroviruses, with some overlap: One version may recognize, say, viruses A, B, and C, while another recognizes B, C, and D. Johnson and colleagues at Boston College and
Harvard are working to identify the specific overlapping targets on the retrovirus shells. To do this, the researchers take advantage of
the fact that two of the rhesus Trim5 variants block HIV-1, the most common HIV strain, while a related strain of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) isn’t blocked by any of the three Trim5 variants.
Kevin McCarthy, a member of Johnson’s lab and a graduate student at Harvard (where Johnson was an associate professor until
early 2012), has been working from genetic codes to systematically swap out small sections of the SIV outer shell
for pieces of HIV-1 shell. By studying Trim5 responses to
the various resulting chimeras—the new viruses made up
of pieces from both—he has identified two segments of
the HIV-1 virus that are targeted by Trim5 in the rhesus
monkey.
Temperature management is critical for electronic devices,
The next step will be to figure out how the Trim5 prowhose components generate heat that can destroy them if it
tein
recognizes these parts: What, specifically, about the
isn’t shed. Diamond is the best-known material for channelsegments
of the HIV-1 shell—their three-dimensional
ing heat away from small and sensitive electronics such as
shape,
say,
or their spatial arrangement as part of the larger
the processors in cellphones and laptops, but real diamond
shell—triggers
Trim5 to engage? Determining that could
and synthetic diamond are expensive. Physics professor David
bring
advances
in uncovering targets and mechanisms for
Broido and colleagues from the Naval Research Laboratory
HIV
drugs.
have developed a way to search for alternatives. In a July
“Trim5 has been adapting to retroviruses for millions
2013 paper in Physical Review Letters, the team described
of
years
and is very good at blocking many different retrotheir approach, which brought unexpected results.
viral
infections,”
says Johnson. “That means Trim5 must be
Broido’s group is primarily interested in non-metals, which
exploiting
something
about the viruses that’s so critical to
carry heat differently than do metals. In metals, electrons
their
nature
they
cannot
easily change it. If we can figure
transport heat, moving throughout the material and diffusing
out
what
it
is,
that
would
be an excellent target for a drug.”
energy. In non-metal compounds such as diamond and graph-

From the laboratories

Good vibrations

ite, heat transfer occurs when atoms vibrate, and the resulting “vibrational waves” carry the heat energy “from hotter to
colder parts” of the material, says Broido. How freely those
waves can move within a material’s atomic structure helps
determine the thermal conductivity.
Broido and colleagues developed a new approach to calculating thermal conductivity, which involves complex equations that,
says Broido, “require powerful computational algorithms that we developed and vast amounts of computer memory,” which, he
adds, was not available a decade ago. The results for materials such as silicon and germanium, whose conductivity is well-established, confirmed that the new methodology has what Broido calls “predictive capability. You tell us the atoms, we will generate a
[conductivity] number for you that should be close to what would be measured in the lab.”
Studies of certain materials have revealed unexpectedly high conductivity numbers, most notably boron arsenide (BAs). Although
BAs had been considered an inadequate candidate for heat transfer applications, based in part on its high atomic weight, Broido’s
calculation has shown it to have thermal conductivity 10 times its previous predicted value and as high as diamond’s. If BAs can be
produced economically—it generally doesn’t “like to form good structures,” Broido notes—it could be a boon to the electronic device industry.
In the meantime, says Broido, “from our studies of BAs, we developed an extended set of criteria for selecting elements to combine into materials with potentially high thermal conductivity. We want to use this new approach to systematically search for other
high thermal conductivity materials that haven’t yet been identified because nobody knew to look at these criteria.”
—Michelle Sipics
Michelle Sipics is a Philadelphia-based science writer.

w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

15

Ad venture
From dorm room to the top-floor office,
from incubator to accelerator, the saga (so far)
of a student startup
By Janelle Nanos ’02

Tom Coburn is charming, and if he had gone through
with his education plan—a biology major, graduation in
2013, followed by medical school—he surely would have
developed a lovely bedside manner as a practicing physician
someday. But today the redheaded 22-year-old Hopkinton,
Massachusetts, native is one of Boston’s youngest CEOs,
and on this autumn morning he’s targeting that charm
instead at the construction workers building the brand new
office space for his online startup, Jebbit, in the Landmark
building near Fenway Park. Riding the elevator in the building’s historic tower, he chats easily with the hard-hat-wearing worker three times his age. The elevator doors glide
open to reveal stunning floor-to-ceiling windows . . . and
one of Jebbit’s programmers dangling like an orangutan, by
one arm then the other, from the steel girders on the ceiling. The programmer grins goofily down at his colleagues
slouched on a gray sectional sofa below him, their baseball
caps turned backward and laptops on their laps. Coburn
shrugs and smiles as he continues with the tour.
The construction worker chuckles and turns to Coburn:
16

bcm v winter 2 0 14

“I’ve been here a week and I still have no idea what it is that
you guys do.”
“We’re in online advertising,” Coburn replies.
That’s certainly one way to describe it. Coburn’s company, Jebbit, is attempting to completely rethink the way we
interact with ads online, and since sharing a first-place finish
in the undergraduate Boston College Venture Competition
(BCVC) in 2011, it’s gotten some significant traction. The
past few years have been a bit of a blur for Coburn and
his cohorts: They’ve been accepted to two of the country’s
most competitive startup accelerators, raised $1.8 million in
funding, found partners in brands such as Coca-Cola, Bose,
and Ralph Lauren, and been named to the Boston Globe’s
“25 Under 25” hot list. Jebbit today has 13 employees, 10
of whom are under the age of 22 (and nine of whom occupy
the same Cleveland Circle house). Last year, Coburn and
two cofounders—chief technology officer Chase McAleese
(also a member of the Class of 2013) and COO Jonathan
Lacoste ’15—left Boston College before they could graduate to pursue Jebbit full-time.

Lacoste (left), Coburn (center), and McAleese ride the elevator to Jebbitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s offices in the historic Landmark building in Boston.

photograph: Lee Pellegrini

w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

17

The past few years have been a bit of a blur for Coburn and his
cohorts: They’ve raised $1.8 million in funding and found partners in
brands such as Coca-Cola, Bose, and Ralph Lauren.
“They’ve been the darling of the Boston tech community
over the last year,” says Paul Tedeschi, an advisor to Jebbit
and the CEO of Campus Agency, a marketer of brands to
the “youth demographic.” The new office is the latest manifestation of Jebbit’s rapid advance: They’ve left behind a
crowded startup cubicle farm and leased the 11th and 14th
floors of the Landmark building—renting out floor space to
other startups while they grow into their quarters.
When Coburn was in the midst of launching Jebbit
in his dorm room three years ago, he became transfixe
by the origin stories of other startups, the tales of small
ideas that begat powerful brands. And as he’s found early
success with his fledgling company, he’s begun to hone his
own mythology. On a September evening in Stokes Hall,
Coburn and Lacoste have been invited to speak at a “fir side chat” (sans fireside) hosted by the student-run Boston
College Entrepreneur Society. About 15 young men and
women snack on pizza as the two lay out their business’s
humble beginnings from the front of the room.
Coburn traces Jebbit’s lineage to Shaw House (home of
the Shaw Leadership Program) in 2010, when he and his
freshman-year roommate, Jeb Thomas ’13, decided to collaborate on a startup idea for the BCVC prize. (Students
at the time could earn $10,000 for a successful project, an
award that has since jumped to $20,000). BCVC is studentrun and funded by donations, and it has been nurturing
undergraduate startups since 2007. (The top prize last year
went to Phyre, a wireless technology company formed by
three computer science majors.) Under its auspices, alumni
volunteers with careers in business—from venture capitalists to lawyers to entrepreneurs—are assigned each fall to
mentor entrants as they refine their business plans. Alumni
also serve alongside faculty members as judges in the spring.
Coburn and Thomas’s first few ideas fell flat, but they
regrouped in their sophomore year after Thomas began
taking a marketing class that had him spend $200 in Google
AdWords to help a local business drive traffic to its website.
The goal of the assignment was to introduce students to
Google’s signature cost-per-click advertising platform: the
formidable technology that accounted for more than 95 percent of the company’s $50 billion-plus in revenues in 2012.
Businesses that are clever about the word cues they submit
to make their ads appear can reap hefty financial rewards
of their own. Coburn and Thomas’s new plan was to help

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bcm v winter 2 0 14

local businesses use AdWords to build brand awareness and
traffic on their websites. But the pair quickly realized online
advertising’s major pitfall: Even when consumers click on
an ad and trigger a cost to the advertiser, more than 50
percent of them rapidly leave—or bounce from—the advertiser’s website. “We were like ‘How can that be acceptable?
How can companies spend millions of dollars on this when
half of the people are literally leaving?’” Coburn says.
Coburn explains how he was wrestling with this fact
one afternoon as he sat in Logan Airport in the spring of
2011 waiting to board the plane to a Boston College golf
club tournament (he cites that moment as the point where
his golf game began its rapid decline). “I was watching a
TV show online, and a 30-second pre-roll ad”—a commercial preceding the content—“came up, so I opened a
new browser tab and was checking my email while the
ad played.” He realized that the advertiser had wasted its
money because he wasn’t listening or paying attention to
its message at all. Coburn says he wondered, “How could
we guarantee a brand that a consumer has actually learned
its message?” That’s when Jebbit’s core idea came to him:
charging advertisers a “cost-per-correct-answer” fee instead
of a cost per click.
He outlined a business plan on the flight, and in the next
few weeks he and Thomas recruited a few friends to put
together a BCVC proposal for a business they dubbed “Add
It Up.” They would create an online platform that guarantees to a brand that consumers have engaged with its content
and understood the brand’s message. To do this, they would
draw consumers to a website that would take them through
several pages of the brand’s campaign. A quiz layer would
appear across the top of the site, asking questions about the
company’s message: A restaurant might ask visitors who
logged onto the site to identify items on its menu, or confirm its hours of service, or recite the charge for delivery.
Every time a user answered correctly, he or she would earn
cash—say, 10 or 25 cents per question—that they could
accumulate on the site and then deposit to an online bank
account. Users who “liked” a company’s Facebook page or
provided their email address could earn more money, all
of which they could cash out in full or exchange for discounts on the company’s offerings. Consumers would be
able to log onto the startup’s website via Facebook, and
each campaign could be targeted based on the demographics provided in their online profile. A young women’s

clothing store, for example, could choose to have only college women see its campaigns, while a Boston gym would
only target its campaigns to users in the New England
region. By using this site, a company would know exactly
how well its message was getting through to consumers,
based on how well the users answered the questions. And
the company would pay for the service only when a user
answered questions correctly.
The business idea was solid enough to earn Coburn and
his colleagues a first-place tie in the BCVC contest that year
with little more than a PowerPoint. “We had mockups of
what the site would look like and how it would work, but
we had no actual software,” says Coburn. But now they had
funding to make it happen.
One of the judges of the BCVC competition was Dan
Nova ’83, a partner at the venture firm Highland Capital. He
encouraged the team to apply for a competitive spot at the
Summer @ Highland startup accelerator—a boot camp that
provides student entrepreneurs with office space, $18,000

in funding ($15,000 at the time), and access to top entrepreneurial advisors. Coburn and his team learned they got into
the program a week after their sophomore year ended, and
ditched their summer internship plans to launch headlong
into the world of startups. As they tried to incorporate,
they quickly found that the “Add It Up” name was already
being used by a major bank, so they scrambled to find a new
company moniker. Coburn’s mother, a real estate agent,
came up with Jebbit, a play on the word “debit” and a nod
to Jeb Thomas, Coburn’s cofounder. (Coburn’s father is
a mortgage broker.) The team spent the summer working
80-hour weeks as they began to develop their website and
wondered how they would maintain this schedule when
classes resumed in the fall.
“We started thinking, ‘How the hell are we going to go
back to school and still keep up this pace?’” Coburn tells the
room. As he began debating whether he should leave school
to pursue the business full-time, he sat down with Peter Bell
’86, another Highland partner. Bell asked him how the site

McAleese overhauled Jebbit’s website two weeks before its official
launch in March of 2012. “I hardly slept. I barely ate. I was just coding
like a madman in my room.”
was coming. It was about 50 percent built. He asked Coburn
about the number of clients Jebbit had acquired. They had
just one, a consignment store in Newton Centre, which so
far had agreed to spend $200 on a campaign. Bell asked
about users. Again Jebbit came up short: They had none.
“He basically told me that we weren’t quite ready to
drop out of school yet,” Coburn recalls with a laugh. “But
he did give us some advice, which is probably some of the
best advice we’ve ever gotten: Come back to BC, find other
smart, hardworking, motivated kids to join us, and build out
a team. So that’s what we did. We came back, and Johnny
over here”—he points to Lacoste—“was one of the first 15
kids we brought on.”
Seeking freshman interns for Jebbit, Coburn and his
team obtained permission from professors of the Carroll
School of Management’s two-dozen Portico classes to make
a pitch to their students. (The Portico course, required of all
CSOM freshmen, introduces ethical theory in tandem with
the fundamentals of finance, marketing, and other business
disciplines.) Lacoste, Jebbit’s current COO, was a freshman at Boston College in 2011, but had already established
himself as an up-and-coming entrepreneur, having won a
local business plan contest in his Cleveland hometown as a
high-school senior. He’d co-designed an online app posting
events likely to attract local college students.
“I have to admit I was somewhat skeptical and unaware
of the jargon” the Jebbit team was using, remembers Ethan
Sullivan, a Portico professor and assistant CSOM dean for
undergraduate curriculum, who was the first to invite them
into his classroom. “But I was incredibly impressed with
their tenacity and their ability to connect with people. They
created this groundswell that really hasn’t subsided.”
By the time Coburn returned to the University for his
junior year, the website was nearly built. Jebbit had accrued
$21,500 in funding from BCVC and their summer at
Highland and several potential clients were expressing interest. Now they needed the key part: users. The team quickly
went about making sure every student at Boston College
knew about Jebbit’s upcoming launch. One assignment for
the freshman interns was to plaster messages all over campus
promoting Jebbit. “We went all around Fulton [Hall], wrote
on all the blackboards,” Lacoste says with a laugh.
Coburn and company planned to turn on their early
“beta” site at 10:11 p.m. on October 11—that is, at 10:11,
10/11/11 (they figured the mnemonic device would be

20

bcm v winter 2 0 14

a nice marketing tactic). Only the first 150 users to sign
on would be allowed access to the site, with a chance to
earn $20 for answering questions correctly about a variety
of brands. Jebbit still had only one paying client, so the
team decided to put some of the remaining prize money
from BCVC toward paying users and help demonstrate
proof-of-concept to other interested companies. Since they
didn’t yet have a way of paying users online, they stationed
Lacoste and other interns around campus to physically hand
out $20 bills when users finished the round of questions.
They had everything in place that evening, and hoped that
by midnight, they might have 150 sign-ups.
“We said midnight is a little aggressive,” Lacoste recalled.
“If it closes out by the end of the next night, realistically,
that’d be great.”
The site went live at 10:11 p.m., and 46 seconds later it
crashed. So many students had tried to log on that they overwhelmed the site, but the team got it back up within the next
two hours, and spent the evening running through campus
handing out payments to the full complement of 150 students. Jebbit was no longer an idea; it was really happening.
“There was a buzz on campus,” Coburn says, and Jebbit had
analytics to show potential clients.
Coburn can still rattle off the precise finding from
that first night: On average, users spent four minutes clicking their way through each campaign, which meant they
were a captive audience for 240 precious seconds (a typical television commercial is 30 seconds long). Eighty-nine
percent of users felt they were now more likely to buy
products from a featured brand, and 98 percent said they
learned something new about each company. “All I did was
repeat those stats for the next six months,” Coburn recalls
now. “Those were pretty much the numbers I used to get
our next 50 clients.”
Coburn and the Jebbit team knew that they were targeting a demographic that advertisers craved: college students
looking for simple ways to earn cash. They applied themselves to bringing in clients, securing 27 in five months,
including early deals with Bose, Coca-Cola, and Zipcar. In
the process, Coburn also reshuffled the team and brought
in classmate Chase McAleese, a whiz-kid programmer who
had been working on his own startup on campus (LeapTask,
an online concierge service for Boston College students,
now defunct). McAleese overhauled Jebbit’s website two

Between Jebbitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 11th- and 14th-floor offices is a basketball court. Lacoste is at left.

photograph: Lee Pellegrini

w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

21

Their grades and their social lives took some significant hits, the
founders say, as they worked to launch Jebbit while still students—
but the college environment provided a support.
weeks before its official launch in March of 2012 (“I hardly
slept. I barely ate. I was just coding like a madman in my
room,” he says now). The team decided to widen their market beyond Boston, and within weeks had students at more
than 1,000 universities across the country logging in and
earning money from the site. During the summer of 2012,
as the company was still ramping up, Lacoste returned from
an internship in China, slept on Coburn’s floor, and worked,
unpaid, selling Jebbit to clients. By the end of the summer,
Jeb Thomas had decided to move on from the enterprise.
“The business itself was something that I just wasn’t as
passionate about anymore, and I didn’t feel like I was ready
to start a business,” Thomas says. “I sort of wanted to gain
real world experience.” Thomas graduated from Boston
College in 2013 and now works in Boston as an analyst for
TM Capital, an investment bank. He maintains a partial
ownership in Jebbit and a close friendship with Coburn.
With Thomas out, Coburn asked Lacoste if he’d step in and
become Jebbit’s COO.
Coburn, McAleese, and Lacoste all say that their grades
and their social lives took some significant hits as they
worked to launch Jebbit while still students—but that
they found the crucible of the college environment provided them with both a support network and a safety net
of sorts. At the fireside chat in September, a young woman
raised a question about their Boston beginnings. “What are
the advantages and disadvantages of being tightly knit in
Boston?” she asked.
Coburn explained that the mentors they’ve found within
the startup community in Boston have offered guidance
through the roughest points—when Thomas left, for example, and the times when they’ve needed to reshuffle their
team or overhaul their website. And he said that, while their
ultimate goal is to be a national company—one that brands
can use to target any demographic they like—it was a huge
advantage for them to focus their energy on college students
and build their identity first by targeting the quarter-million
students in the Boston area.
John Gallaugher, associate professor of information systems and a faculty advisor to the BCVC, would agree. “We
really are in this golden age of collegiate entrepreneurship,”
he says: “It’s never been easier for a student to take his or her
idea and to experiment with a business. We’ve got the cloud
and the app store, and open-sourced software, so you can
literally start a business with beer money.”

22

bcm v winter 2 0 14

By February of 2013, Jebbit had way more than beer
money—they’d raised $500,000 with the help of angel
investors and the venture firm Boston Seed Capital. Coburn,
McAleese, and Lacoste decided to take a leave from their
studies to grow the business full time. (They worked with
the University to ensure they’d be in good standing to fi ish their degrees later on.) A few weeks after they left college, they learned that they’d been accepted to TechStars, a
prestigious startup accelerator in Boston that would provide
them with $100,000 in additional financing. They were the
youngest team ever to be rewarded in the international competition for a TechStars nod.
Coburn is humble about getting the TechStars spot,
pointing out that they had applied the previous year and
not been accepted, but observers of the tech industry say
that the contest confers some serious bragging rights while
giving fledgling business owners access to big players who
can write big checks. “These workshops and incubator
programs help startups raise money,” says Sullivan. “Very
early on, they were able to learn how to talk about their
brand and their product,” he says of the Jebbit team. The
TechStars program was a crash course touching on much
that business school teaches, which was particularly helpful,
Coburn points out, as he was still a biology major when he
left Boston College. (As a backup plan, he’d applied to medical school and had been accepted.)
Gallaugher says that he’s been impressed by the maturity
of the Jebbit team and their ideas since he first met with
Coburn for some BCVC guidance in 2009. Having cultivated access to collegiate users, “Jebbit has the holy grail of
advertising,” he says. “And a consumer-facing business like
this, it’s inherently viral. So getting one side of the two-sided
market was no problem. The magic that they pulled off, that
really shows their maturity and ability to carry themselves
well, was that they were able to get top-tier advertisers.”
Coburn, McAleese, and Lacoste now serve as the company’s three chief officers: CEO, CTO, and COO, respectively. McAleese leads the (often unruly) tech team in coding
and building out ad platforms. Lacoste focuses on developing relationships with advertising firms who are looking
for new ways to serve their clients, and Coburn is always
looking for the next brand to bring on board while working
to raise funds to keep Jebbit growing. This past summer, he
established Jebbit’s board of directors, naming two early
mentors to the board along with himself.

David George is a board member who first began advising the team while they were at TechStars. “There’s certainly tons of ad technology around engagement, but I haven’t
seen anything to date that’s taking [Jebbit’s] approach,” he
says, to explain what drew him to Jebbit. The competition
includes sites such as Jingit, which offers cash on behalf of
brands to users who fill out surveys, and Dailybreak, which
rewards users for answering quizzes about pop culture,
fashion, and other topics. Jebbit is different, George suggests. “It’s pushing the consumer to actually think about the
brand” and to internalize what its ads tell them.
Scott Savitz, of the venture firm Data Point Capital,
has also joined the board. He offered Jebbit an additional
$750,000 in funding as the team finished the TechStars
program last summer, bringing the investment amassed
by Jebbit to the current total of $1.8 million. “They’re very
self-aware and they’ve surrounded themselves with a lot of
smart people,” says Savitz of the founders. “I feel like every
day they’re coming in and learning, and what’s nice about
that is that they’re learning quick. They’re quick to change
what’s not working and quick to expand on what’s working
well. And I don’t think they know failure yet, which could be
a positive in many cases,” he adds.
Every week, Jebbit’s staff of 13 gathers around the
office couch for a “town meeting.” Going clockwise around
the room, each employee is expected to share recent high
and low points and thank the colleague who helped him
or her most. Coburn believes such team-building efforts
are key to a company’s success, and that’s also the reason
why he’s sharing an apartment with eight other employees. Aside from the occasional ski outing or movie night,
members of the team typically work at all hours and plow
through 18-hour days.
In late November, the high point nearly everyone cited
was “Jebbitsgiving,” turkey with trimmings prepared at
the apartment for the entire staff. But despite that positive
vibe, this meeting was a bit more tense than most: Coburn,
McAleese, and Lacoste had presented their 2014 goals to
the team a few days earlier, and the group was asking questions about exactly where Jebbit-dot-com was headed.
As Jebbit has taken off, Coburn and the team have been
retooling their business strategy. In the town meeting, they
discussed their decision to move beyond the college market
and, perhaps more important, to shift the company away
from being a destination website—one that users need
to know about in advance—and toward the placement of
Jebbit’s technology “throughout the web,” Coburn says.
That shift took effect in January, with an announcement
that Jebbit had “graduated” from its days of catering to college students. The shutdown of all campaigns on the Jebbitdot-com site was met with some frustration from its fans,

who had grown accustomed to using the site as a way to
earn quick cash, but Coburn says the move reflects a larger
vision for the company. Ironically, that vision means the
company will now be competing in the very marketplace
Jebbit was meant to subvert: amid the clamor of online
banner ads. The Jebbit-enabled ads will stand out, Coburn
says. Companies will promote the campaigns through their
social media channels and websites, and Jebbit will entice
users with the same reward system that has proven to be
their differentiating factor.
Users on the old Jebbit-dot-com website answered more
than 1 million questions and earned more than $100,000.
Coburn and colleagues have the data to show that those
users demonstrated 78 percent better memory retention
of a brand’s message than individuals exposed to a typical
banner ad, even months after they’d seen the campaign. As
Jebbit has begun to add its cost-per-correct-answer technology to “native” websites—meaning the campaign is embedded in a brand’s site, matching its color scheme and logo
design—they’ve found that brand engagement has tripled.
There’s still some uncertainty about whether this new
plan will prove fruitful, particularly as nearly every company with an online presence—Google included—is trying
to secure an edge in the rapidly evolving frontier of online
advertising that’s now increasingly going mobile. “Saying
‘If you build it they will come’—that doesn’t happen on
the Internet,” says business consultant and Jebbit advisor
Jere Doyle ’87, founder of the online marketer Prospectiv
(geared to female consumers). “I think they have a great
foundation, but the next 18 months will be critical for them.
Internet years are like dog years,” Doyle says, and “not
everyone is going to build Instagram or Twitter. It’s about
who can hire the right team.” The Jebbit team has been
growing, and they’ve brought in some impressive—and
mature —hires. Lucy McQuilken of Groove Mobile and HP
is now acting as their “contract” CFO, and they’ve recently
brought in Matt Belson, a 10-year marketing veteran, to
help them with sales.
“We were college students, with no background in entrepreneurship or the ad tech world,” Coburn says, sounding
incredulous as he looks around Jebbit’s Landmark offices.
For the moment, he’s alone on the top floor, and the building’s gorgeous, arched Art Deco windows offer panoramic
views of the Charles River and Fenway Park. Coburn
approaches the windows that face west, and points. “See
that hill over there? That tower? That’s Gasson Hall,” he
says. He turns east, where the towers of Boston’s financial
district glimmer in the morning sunlight. n
Janelle Nanos ’02 is a senior editor at Boston Magazine. She earned an
MA in journalism from New York University, was a reporter for New
York Magazine, and served as an editor at National Geographic Traveler.

w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

23

photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

24

bcm v winter 2 0 14

MEMORIAL

DAYS
For 45 years after John Fitzgibbons â&#x20AC;&#x2122;67
was killed during a night patrol in
TĂ˘y Ninh Province, Vietnam, his family
seldom spoke of its shattering loss.
Then a package arrived
By Zachary Jason

The medals of John F. Fitzgibbons and the package in which they were returned.

w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

25

o

n an afternoon in 1996, beneath clothes

stashed under the rear seats of a rusted blue Ford
woodie station wagon they had just acquired from
a friend, John and Debbie Benedetto, a middle-aged couple
from Wakefield, Massachusetts, found three small, weathered black leather boxes, one containing a Purple Heart,
another a Bronze Star Medal, and the third an Air Medal
and Vietnam Service Medal. The medals were unblemished
and inscribed with the name: “John F. Fitzgibbons.” The
Benedettos looked through phone books and talked with
the car’s previous owner, seeking clues about Fitzgibbons.
They turned up nothing, and for 17 years, the medals sat in
a desk drawer at their auto repair shop. Occasionally, the
Benedettos brought them out to show to clients, particularly
those who had served in Vietnam. But still no clues.
Then, one morning in the spring of 2013, John Benedetto
took the medals from the drawer and he and his wife began
another search for John F. Fitzgibbons, this time using a tool
not available to them in 1996, the Internet.
They found him on the Boston College Veterans
Memorial website, a member of the Class of 1967, and
learned that he too had been a Wakefield native, had grown
up four blocks from their shop, and had been a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army and was killed on November 25, 1968,
two weeks after his 23rd birthday, in the province of Tây
Ninh, in what was then South Vietnam. Below his name,
they found a brief remembrance from Jack DeVeer ’63, who
was his cousin. It read: “He was a wonderful person/cousin.
The oldest of 11 children. There are no winners in war.” The
Benedettos turned back to the Web, and though they did not
find Jack DeVeer, they did find his older brother Richard,
a priest at St. Francis Xavier Church in South Weymouth,
Massachusetts. They mailed the medals to him, wrapped in
a miniature American flag
Rev. DeVeer had never seen the medals. They had not
been on display at John Fitzgibbons’s funeral Mass, which
DeVeer, then 29 years old, had presided over, though he
does not remember today what he said in his homily.
On Saturday, May 25, 2013, one week after he received
the medals, and on what happened to be Memorial Day
Weekend, Rev. DeVeer, now 74, during his homily at the
4:00 p.m. Mass and before a full house of 400 parishioners,
lifted a small box from the credence table and opened it to

expose the Purple Heart. He then recounted the story of his
cousin’s sacrifice, and talked of those he left behind. “One
of his friends and track teammates at Boston College is here
in our parish today,” he said. DeVeer set the medal back
and walked in his green vestments down the aisle to Paul
Delaney ’66, a congregant DeVeer has known for years.
DeVeer told the congregation that Delaney had trained with
Fitzgibbons in Boston College’s ROTC program, and he
then hugged him and returned to the altar, as Deacon Joseph
Canova, whose brother was killed in Vietnam, played “Taps”
on the French horn.
On the following Wednesday, DeVeer drove 40 miles
from South Weymouth to the prim white home of Joyce
Fitzgibbons, in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. Sixty-six years
old, she was 18 months younger than the first-born, John—
the sibling closest to him in spirit as well as age.
Joyce could not recall having seen the medals since 1980,
when the house in which she and John and their brothers
and sisters grew up was sold. She set them, wrapped in the
flag the Benedettos had provided, on a side table in her living room, a place her 92-year-old mother, Jean, who lives six
months a year in an adjoining guesthouse owned by Joyce,
never visits. Joyce did not intend to tell her about the medals.
But on July 4, the Boston Globe, which, with the family’s
consent had been alerted to the story by Boston College
(which itself had learned of the story through Delaney), ran
an article. The headline read “Fallen Soldier’s Lost Medals
Returned to His Family.” Joyce, who spoke to the reporter
for the family, began to receive calls, emails, and letters from
John’s old friends, members of her extended family, and
military personnel who knew John during training and in
Vietnam. A nearly 45-year silence was broken.

Named after his paternal grandfather—a butcher’s
apprentice who migrated from County Cork to Boston
at the turn of the 20th century and went on to found the
Bristol Coat & Apron Company, a uniform supplier to
hotels, hospitals, restaurants, and mechanics—John Francis
Fitzgibbons was born November 8, 1945, three months
after VJ Day and two months after Ho Chi Minh declared
Vietnam independent from France.
He was raised in a three-story stucco Georgian house at

The headline read “Fallen Soldier’s Lost Medals Returned to His
Family.” Joyce began to receive calls, emails, and letters from
John’s old friends, members of her extended family, and military
personnel who knew John during training and in Vietnam.
26

the edge of Wakefield’s Lake Quannapowitt, 15 miles north
of Boston. There were five bedrooms on the third floor that
eventually accommodated Daniel and Jean Fitzgibbons’s
children. At six each weekday evening, with Daniel still
at work in the South End, Jean (a native of Arlington,
Massachusetts) served plated dinners—never buffets—and
sat in the middle of a custom-made horseshoe-shaped
Formica table, five children to her left, six to her right. In
descending order of age: John, Joyce, Corinne, Maryanne,
Dan, Bryant, Lisa, the twins Jean and Joan, Lane, and
Andrew. After dinner and on weekends, the children sometimes staged impromptu musicals, or put on Howdy Doodyinspired puppet shows, or sang Irish folk songs (including
“Danny Boy” when their father returned from work) for
their parents and family friends. John was invariably the
guitarist. He also played his acoustic guitar—bent over his
Beatles songbook—in one of the family’s two station wagons as they drove down I-95 to Florida each February: Cape
Canaveral, Fort Lauderdale, Palm Springs.
“It was a party all the time,” says Joyce Fitzgibbons,
who has the same blue eyes and pert nose that John and
many of the children inherited from their mother. Over
lunch last fall beside Boston’s Fort Point Channel (near the
photograph: Courtesy of Joyce Fitzgibbons

law office where she worked as a secretary until retiring
in November), I asked her questions about John’s death.
She turned the conversation back to childhood stories.
Neighborhood hockey games on the frozen lake. Pool parties in the backyard. Fish platters at The Ship, in Saugus.
The Fitzgibbons family sat in the first two pews at St.
Joseph’s Church every Sunday morning (admiring congregants invariably asked Jean Fitzgibbons, “How do you keep
them all so well-behaved?”). I asked Joyce if her mother
would be willing to talk about John. She replied that Jean
had once told her, “God was very kind and took most of my
memories of John away from me.”
John was the peaceful, tender, merry, quick-witted leader
of the Fitzgibbons children. “He was a third parent, but also
the pied piper. You always wanted to be where he was,” said
Joyce. He helped craft his siblings’ art projects, taught his
four brothers how to throw a football and flick a wrist shot
with a hockey stick, snuffed out arguments, broke up casual
chatter with memorable darts of dry humor.
As a young teenager, Fitzgibbons determined to attend
Central Catholic High School, in Lawrence, Massachusetts,
instead of the local public school. He rose at five in the
morning to travel 20 miles, sometimes hitchhiking, somew i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

27

times taking a train and bus to the then all-male Marist
Brothers academy, where he joined the cross-country and
track teams and made a friend in Terence “Terry” Flynn,
now a semi-retired superior court judge in New Jersey.
“When you push yourself and you sweat day after day, you
get to know the depths of your character and the character

His cousin Jack DeVeer
told Fitzgibbons about
football games in Alumni
Stadium, brotherhood in the
dorms, and Army ROTC’s
annual ball. “I don’t like to
think about if I influen ed
him at all into signing up
[for ROTC]. But that haunts
me,” DeVeer says.
of those who you run with,” Flynn said in a phone interview.
“When I think of him now, I think of running beside him. . . .
He was so remarkably stable. Quiet, never flashy.” Not until
he stayed one night at the Fitzgibbons’s house during senior
year—when Fitzgibbons was track co-captain—did Flynn
learn that his friend had allergies and needed to sleep sitting
up before each race day.
Her brother “had a self-confidence, yet a deep humility,” says Joyce. Twice Fitzgibbons won Central Catholic’s
Legion of Honor award, granted to students for character,
academic performance, and contributions to school life. He
didn’t tell his parents on either occasion. He didn’t want to
disrupt their busy lives to attend the ceremonies, Joyce says.
Daniel Fitzgibbons, their father, was born and raised in
Medford, Massachusetts. When World War II broke out, he
was 24 years old and wanted to enlist. His father, the Irish
immigrant, prevailed upon him to wait until the military
called for him. After he was drafted and had begun bombardier training, Daniel Fitzgibbons suffered an accident
and served the rest of the war as an Army instructor in
Washington state and Florida. Soon after marrying Jean in
1944, he took over the linen company—as he was meant to.
The Bristol Coat & Apron Company was to be John’s
28

bcm v winter 2 0 14

to run after he earned his Boston College degree. During
summers throughout high school, Fitzgibbons and his cousin Jack DeVeer (now a retired financial advisor living in
Georgia) delivered sheets and towels to motels in a company station wagon. “Work was a lark with him,” says DeVeer.
“Hey, Pierre!” Fitzgibbons would call out to a beret-wearing
housepainter they often passed as they drove along Route 1
north of Boston. It was during these summers that DeVeer,
a Boston College student four years older than his cousin,
told Fitzgibbons about football games in Alumni Stadium,
brotherhood in the dorms, and Army ROTC’s annual ball.
“I don’t like to think about if I influenced him at all into signing up [for ROTC]. But that haunts me,” DeVeer says.
Fitzgibbons was offered a track scholarship to
Providence College, but enrolled in the College of Business
Administration at Boston College in September 1963.

On September 9, 1968, having completed a year
of infantry training, beginning in Fort Benning, Georgia,
First Lieutenant John Francis Fitzgibbons, “Fitzy,” to his
friends, boarded a commercial airliner for a stopover in San
Francisco. From there he would take an Army transport
plane. His final destination was Camp Evans, a wire-bordered base of tents and helicopters that supported 10,000
U.S. soldiers, some 40 miles south of the North Vietnam
border, along Highway 1 in the South China Sea’s coastal
plain. His parents and siblings drove him to Logan Airport
in East Boston to see him off. And after he boarded, they
stood in the terminal and scanned the airplane, hoping for a
glimpse of his face in a window.
“I was the last in my family to see him alive,” Maryanne
(Fitzgibbons) Pagnotti wrote to me in December 2013 from
her home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She had moved to
California with her boyfriend in 1967 at age 17, after graduating from high school. She hadn’t spoken to her family
since, and had unknowingly booked the same flight as John
after a brief visit to Boston. John Fitzgibbons noticed her
a few rows ahead, she wrote, and asked a stewardess if he
could sit with his sister, whom he had not seen since reporting to basic training a year earlier. Pagnotti remembers his
despondence throughout the six-hour ride. At one point she
suggested they explore the cliffs and Redwoods in Big Sur
when he returned. He touched her hand and said, “If I come
back, Maryanne.” Pagnotti, today a retired hairstylist, wrote,
“He knew. He was trying to prepare me.”
They spent the afternoon at the house where she rented
a room, in Palo Alto, and in the early evening she drove him
onto the tarmac at the Oakland Army Base, where the transport plane’s engines were already roaring. John was running
late. “I always blamed myself for dropping him off. . . . I
cannot remember if I told him I loved him, or if we hugged.

Did I kiss him goodbye? I have no memory of that, only the
constant regret.”
Seven months and 10 days earlier, on January 30, 1968,
the Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA)
had launched a surprise offensive in the first hours of Tet,
the Vietnamese lunar new year, storming American Army
bases, military airports, and more than 100 cities and towns
in a single night, including the South Vietnamese capital,
Saigon, where the U.S. embassy was attacked. While the Tet
Offensive ultimately stalled, it became a strategic victory for
the communists, as Americans at home came to see the war
as unwinnable. War correspondent Michael Herr would
describe the impact of the Tet Offensive in his award-winning 1977 book Dispatches: “Vietnam was a dark room full
of deadly objects, the VC were everywhere all at once like a
spider cancer, and instead of losing the war in little pieces
over years we lost it fast in under a week.”

By the time Fitzgibbons landed on September 11,
some 30,000 Americans had been killed in the war and
more than 100,000 wounded, and protests boiled, even at
Fitzgibbons’s relatively apolitical alma mater, where students shouted “Baby Killer” at fellow students in military
uniform. Fitzgibbons set foot in Vietnam just after Gallup
polls revealed that 65 percent of the country believed the
United States made a mistake in sending troops and only 26
percent approved of President Lyndon Johnson’s handling
of the conflict
A Dean’s List graduate with a major in economics,
Fitzgibbons joined the Army Reserve through ROTC on
June 3, 1967, two days before Commencement. He signed
up for as much training as possible—to prepare for his inevitable deployment to Vietnam, he said at the time—jumping with the 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg, North
Carolina, rappelling down mountain faces, studying venom-

Images provided by Tortolani from the fall of 1968 (clockwise from top left): Black Virgin Mountain (Núi Bà Đen) in Tây Ninh Province, as seen from an American
fire base; Tortolani, beside an ambulance; the barracks at Camp Evans; a platoon heading out for a nightime patrol in Tây Ninh.

photographs: Courtesy of Robert Tortolani

w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

29

The quiet and slyly funny Fitzgibbons—six feet tall and 150
pounds—shocked his friends and family by volunteering for the
infantry. His elite assault division, the 1st Air Cav., would suffer
more casualties than any other American division in Vietnam.
ous snakes, and practicing ambushes at Ranger School in
Georgia and Florida. The Army showed Fitzgibbons footage of American soldiers hanging upside-down from trees
and the Viet Cong pouring sand down their noses.
The quiet and slyly funny Fitzgibbons—six feet tall and
150 pounds—had shocked his friends and family by volunteering for the infantry. By contrast, nearly all of his fellow
ROTC cadets signed up for support branches when they
entered the reserves. Moreover, Fitzgibbons was assigned
to the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), known as the 1st
Air Cav., an elite assault division that would suffer more
casualties than any other American division in Vietnam:
5,464 killed and 26,592 wounded of out of more than
90,000 who served, according to the division’s records.
With a 20-round M16 and seven-round Colt M1911 sidearm, he would lead a 20-man rifle platoon as a first lieutenant. (A common joke told him by his commanding
officers was that “the average lifespan of a first lieutenant
in Vietnam was 38 seconds.”)
Days after he touched down 13,000 miles from Boston,
Fitzgibbons jumped from a helicopter, landed awkwardly,
and injured his ankle. A tall, thin, dark-haired 27-year-old
physician and Army captain who had arrived in Vietnam
only a week earlier treated Fitzgibbons in a tent-clinic at
Camp Evans. The two found each other kindred souls.
“He was one of the two or three most outstanding people
I’ve met in my life. And I knew him for two months,” Robert
Tortolani said last fall. Now 72, he is a family medicine physician in private practice in southeast Vermont, and while the
dark hair that appears in photographs taken when he knew
Fitzgibbons has turned gray, it is still thick, and he still stands
upright at his full height of six feet, three inches.
A framed photograph that he took of Fitzgibbons’s name
etched on the Vietnam Wall in Washington, D.C., hangs on
the wall of an exam room in Tortolani’s clinic. Few patients
ask about it, he says, and he only brings up Fitzgibbons
when fellow veterans talk about lost friends. Carrying a
cardboard box containing books on Vietnam, a slide projector, and a steel briefcase full of 35-millimeter Kodachrome
images he’d shot in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969 and pulled
from his attic the night before, he led me through the
parking lot to a conference room at Brattleboro Memorial
Hospital, next door to his practice. He’d also wanted to
30

bcm v winter 2 0 14

show me his Vietnam diary, in which he had written on the
night Fitzgibbons was killed, but hadn’t been able to find it.
“Probably a good reason for that,” he said. Tortolani was
at the base clinic tending to wounded when Fitzgibbons’s
body and those of the six men killed in the same action were
brought to him in green canvas bags. His duty was to open
the bags and write up what he saw.
As he flicked on the projector fan, he said, “Before you
land, you know you’re in Vietnam from the smell: ordnance,
artillery, and we burned our excrement.” Moving through
images he was revisiting for the first time in decades, he
paused at a photograph of a few hundred men in green
fatigues sitting in rows of folding chairs in the shade of
tarpaulins. It was taken in An Khê, a town in the Central
Highlands that served as the 1st Air Cav. division headquarters, where he and Fitzgibbons first landed to learn their
assignments. “These men here are waiting for a freedom
bird [a plane that returned soldiers to the States] to take
them home. It’s one of the first things I saw when I arrived.
They’d been there a year. They looked tired.”
While Fitzgibbons hobbled on crutches, the 1st Air
Cav. worked at clearing NVA troops from the populated
rice-growing lowlands and raiding NVA strongholds in the
mountains in the area west of Camp Evans. During the day,
he helped plan nighttime missions for his platoon. The monsoon season had arrived and, along with it, mud. Tortolani
flashed through slides of the camp. A portrait of the young
doctor in fatigues and an M1 helmet: “That’s me in a sandbag bunker. A lot of places to dive if you’ve got incoming
rounds. It was frustrating because you never saw the enemy
there. But men were getting booby-trapped at night.” A row
of Army outhouses: “You had to be careful. Every once in a
while they’d get hit by a rocket.”
Almost every night, Fitzgibbons and Tortolani met for a
couple of hours in the officers’ club—a tent—for beer and
soda. Fitzgibbons and the doctor—a native of Plainville,
Connecticut, who’d joined the Army to avoid being drafted
in the midst of his residency (“If you wanted to have any
control of your [military] life as a doctor, the thing to do was
sign up,” he said)—recounted their days’ tasks and chatted
about sports, their hometowns, and the kind of cars they’d
like to drive when they got back to “the world.” Fitzgibbons
talked about missing his wife, Linda, whom he had known

Fitzgibbons (center) at 16, training with the Central Catholic High School cross-country team in the fall of 1962. Terry Flynn is to his right.

for less than two years.
“He was very unusually kind and humble. Did it make
sense for him to be a leader? Yes. To be in combat? No. He
was a very gentle soul,” said Tortolani. Some men, he said,
were clearly in Vietnam to exorcise demons and kill, but
Fitzgibbons “saw his only task as keeping his men alive.”
“We [never] said anything about if one of us died, would
you try to say something to our families?” Tortolani said.
“You don’t think you’re going to die when you’re that
young, even in Vietnam.”
In his tent later in the night, Fitzgibbons would write to
Linda, to an old roommate from Boston College, and to his
father, Daniel Fitzgibbons, who read his son’s reports and
relayed the less dispiriting details to Jean and the children.

On September 24, 1968, Fitzgibbons wrote from Camp Evans to
his friend Bob Murphy ’67.
Hi Robert,
The reason I addressed the letter to you was due to
the fact that I may chance to use a few four-letter words
and wouldn’t want to offend Betty. Well how goes it
back in the World?
photograph: Courtesy of Terry Flynn

I’ve been over here a little over two weeks now
and got assigned to the 1st Air Cavalry (Division
Airmobile) and you wouldn’t believe where we are
located—47 miles south of the DMZ, right in between
the mountains and the coastline surrounded on four
sides by 30,000 VC & NVA.
I’m going to be platoon leader for the weapons
platoon for one more week and then I take over the
3rd platoon (their leader was just killed last week by a
booby trap).
We have a Division Base Camp up north here called
Camp Evans. It contains all the headquarter sections of
the various brigades and battalions plus a small airfiel
and some supporting units and one unit for base defense.
The 1st Cav. is unique for its airmobility, we are still
the old ground-pounding infantry but we have an ability to be transported from one area to another by choppers (birds).
For instance my platoon has an area of operation
(AO) 10 miles outside of Camp Evans. We conduct
search and destroy operations and cordon and search
villages. If I ever get pinned down or in heavy contact by
Charlie I can be reinforced by another platoon in about
15–30 minutes by the use of “birds.” This gives us the
w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

31

ability to work more independently and in larger areas.
Last night we got the shit mortared out of us by
Charlie, however we were very lucky and took light casualties. This coming Sat. or Sun. I’ll be going on my firs
Charlie Alpha i.e. combat assault. These are made from
the air by birds on an LZ. We try and catch “Charlie” off
guard. (By the way if you ever write or talk to Linda don’t
mention about the mortars or assaults. I write to her daily
but I don’t necessarily give all the details, otherwise she’d
worry too much.)
Anyway this northern area is real bad up here. The
people are mainly V.C. sympathizers, which create [sic]
many problems. This is also the second greatest riceproducing section in Vietnam and “Charlie” desperately
wants it. Another bad thing about this area is that the
monsoon season is setting in. From now until mid March
all we get is constant rain and drizzle and it rains like
you’ve never seen before, and gets cold at night.
I’d better stop complaining.
These Peace talks are getting on my ass. If they ever
stop the bombing this area is definitely in a world of
hurt [because] all the work that’s been done and the lives
lost will be wasted[.] [E]ven with the bombing going on
Charlie still infiltrates over 1,000 troops per month.
I just got a 10-day-old Boston Globe, which headlines
stated “HHH [Democratic Party presidential nominee
Hubert Humphrey] sees ’68 Viet Cutback,” which is a lot
of B.S. if troops are ever moved, but you better believe
they’d be short-timers located in the least strategic position in Vietnam.
By the way I haven’t showered in two weeks either.
We have a water shortage problem. We just can’t drink
out of the river or no telling what we’d catch.
Had quite a coincidence when I got to the 1st Cav. The
chaplain in my Brigade over here is the same one who
married Linda and I at Ft. Bragg. We’re real good friends.
Well that’s it for now. I’ll write to you occasionally.
Looks as if it’s going to be a long shitty year. If you’re in
Boston during Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc., I’d appreciate if you might call Linda for a few minutes if you get the
chance. I feel bad for her[.] [S]he’s going to have a rough
and lonely year.
Of course if I look on the bright side of things I’ll be
in Hawaii in another six or seven months with Linda on
R&R.
Enjoy the football season.
—Fitz

John Fitzgibbons arrived at the Heights as a freshman just as Boston College was pivoting from its role of
educating Boston-area Catholic men to a being university
32

bcm v winter 2 0 14

with broader ambitions. During the previous March and
April, the school’s Centennial celebration had featured
symposia on “The Knowledge Explosion,” 20th-century
American drama, and change within the Catholic Church,
and President John F. Kennedy had set off Centennialday festivities with a keynote speech in Alumni Stadium.
Admission counselors, under instructions from President
Michael Walsh, SJ, were recruiting at out-of-state Catholic
high schools, courting valedictorians and salutatorians with
a new honors program, merit scholarship offers, and new
dormitories on the Upper Campus. Still, like half of the
freshmen, Fitzgibbons commuted daily to the University,
rising at five to dress—his was one of the last freshman
classes required to wear a coat and tie—carpooling 20 miles
from Wakefield, and staying until six each evening.
A track walk-on as a middle-distance runner, Fitzgibbons
jogged with his teammates around the Chestnut Hill
Reservoir in the early afternoons and then ran intervals
on a wooden track just outside the stadium’s chain-link
fence. He “was always positive, and always pushing us to
turn in good times,” recalls Paul Delaney, a fellow runner
and ROTC cadet, who would also serve in Vietnam. “And
he had that great dry sense of humor.” In the winter, team
members often had to remove snow from the track. “Run
for BC?” Fitzgibbons would call out, “Here’s your shovel.”
A retired IBM executive and the driving force behind
creation of the Boston College Veterans Memorial on
Burns Library Lawn in 2009, Delaney recalls the moment
when Fr. DeVeer approached him at Mass last Memorial
Day weekend: “I just melted,” he says. Fitzgibbons’s death
had always perplexed Delaney. “He wasn’t the gung-ho
type who would go into infantry and the airborne,” he says.
“He was so quiet and conscientious.” Cadet Noel Schaub
’67, today an office manager in Hingham, Massachusetts,
also recalls a reserved Fitzgibbons: “I remember seeing
John walk on campus in his uniform, and you knew he was a
cut above. He wasn’t gregarious or loud, just everything he
said was thought out, and you wanted to listen.”
Through his firstfew weeks at Boston College, Fitzgibbons
remained undecided about Army ROTC, which at the time
was one of the most prominent organizations on campus.
Two hundred freshmen—some 15 percent of the class—
signed up that fall. “None of us were hawks,” says Harry Fish
’68, now a retired salesman. “We were just taught that if your
country calls you’re expected to serve. You’re supposed to
march up the hill. We grew up with our dads’ and uncles’ stories of Iwo Jima and Midway.” Fitzgibbons’s parents neither
encouraged nor discouraged his joining. As many of his new
friends enrolled, John reached his decision sometime toward
the end of his first month on campus. “It was a fait accompli
by then, says his sister Joyce.
When Fitzgibbons entered ROTC in the fall of 1963, the

likelihood than an enlisted infantryman, much less a commisioned reservist, would die in a war in Indochina seemed
remote—even inconceivable. Some 16,000 American military advisors were then serving in South Vietnam, training
the South Vietnamese Army and providing defoliation support using Agent Orange and other herbicides. In the 13
years since U.S. military advisors first arrived in Vietnam to
support the French, exactly 200 Americans had been killed.
Fitzgibbons turned 18 on November 8, one week after
South Vietnam’s president, Ngô Dinh Diêm, was murdered
in a coup sponsored by the United States and two weeks
before Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy.
Fitzgibbons and fellow ROTC cadet Peter Osmond ’67 were
in a French class in Lyons Hall, practicing verb conjugations,

In October 1965, months
after California students
burned draft cards at the
Berkeley Draft Board, 4,000
Boston College students and
faculty signed a statement
supporting the war and
mailed it to “our fighting
men in Vietnam.”
when, Osmond says, “someone came to the door and told
the professor that Kennedy was dead.” Hundreds of students
gathered around stopped cars on College Road to listen to
the car radios.
The following August, North Vietnamese torpedo boats
attacked the USS Maddox, a Navy destroyer patrolling the
Gulf of Tonkin. After the Maddox reported a second attack
two days later (doubted by many in government and the
press at the time and thereafter), Congress passed a resolution granting President Johnson authority to use military
force without formally declaring war. The United States
began bombing North Vietnam at the end of the month.
The first American ground troops—two Marine battalions
assigned to defend the Da Nang airbase—arrived in South
Vietnam on March 8, 1965, per request of General William
Westmoreland, commander of the Military Assistance
Command, Vietnam (MACV).
Dissent in the States began to grow. At the end of March

1965, some 3,500 students attended a two-day antiwar
teach-in at the University of Michigan. By the end of 1965,
more than 75 chapters of Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) had formed. Students began staging sit-ins—at the
universities of Chicago, Berkeley, Kansas, and Maine.
Response at Boston College was slower to coalesce and
also mixed. Sentiment against the war was first raised in
the Heights on April 2, 1965, when a junior wrote an op-ed
decrying the Pentagon’s decision to use incendiary phosphorus bombs against the NVA. In October 1965, months
after California students burned draft cards at the Berkeley
Draft Board, 4,000 Boston College students and faculty
signed a statement supporting the war and mailed the threepound letter to “our fighting men in Vietnam.” A year later,
as the American death toll approached 10,000, a band of
Boston College students harassed four members of the
Greater Boston Coordinating Committee to End the War
in Vietnam and drove them from the campus. “You preach
non-violence, I preach violence,” one heckler shouted. The
first student-organized anti-Vietnam protest on record at
the Heights took place on October 20, 1966, when half a
dozen students picketed outside as Vice President Hubert
Humphrey spoke in the Roberts Center, the basketball arena
that later made way for the Merkert Chemistry Center. But
even earlier, in the spring of 1965, as the number of troops
in Vietnam reached 100,000, Boston College students stood
and mocked cadets as they drilled with their rifles outside
ROTC headquarters in the Roberts Center.
May 1965 was a point of decision for Fitzgibbons and
other sophomore cadets. They were required to declare
whether they would continue with ROTC’s advanced course
for upperclassmen and then enter the Army Reserve. At
the time, a reserve commission, as compared with a draft
notice, seemed to improve the odds of serving in the States
and not in a war zone—Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford
didn’t mobilize the Army Reserve until April 1968—and the
$27 monthly stipend that upperclassmen received would
likely have influenced Fitzgibbons’s decision as well. That
spring, he and his friends Noel Schaub, Pete Osmond, and
D. Michael Ryan were among 48 of some 100 cadets who
signed a contract with the Army, committing to ROTC
through graduation.

In late October of 1968, Fitzgibbons—his leg cast
rotting from the damp—flew with his battalion 600 miles
due south from Camp Evans to Tây Ninh, a province of fla
farmlands and rain forests that juts into Cambodia some 50
miles northwest of Saigon (now, Ho Chi Minh City). In the
weeks before, the NVA and VC had assembled an estimated
four divisions along the border, and U.S. Army General
Creighton Abrams, who had succeeded Westmoreland as
w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

33

Linda Pickett and Fitzgibbons in 1967, a few months before they wed.

MACV commander that June, feared an attack on Saigon,
comparable to the Tet Offensive. Under Operation Liberty
Canyon, Abrams ordered the 1st Air Cav. to relocate 11,500
troops and 3,400 tons of cargo in two weeks (it would
remain the largest American combat deployment of the
war). Major General George Forsythe, just two months
into leading the Air Cav., asked if he could veil the move
from the NVA as much as possible. Could they stagger the
operation? Could they remove the yellow Cav. insignia from
planes? No. Abrams wanted to send a message, and ordered
Forsythe to “leave the patch on to show them . . . you could
move a division 600 miles overnight.”
Stretched along a 150-mile arc of the unfamiliar
Cambodian frontier, the Air Cav. force built a strand of fir
support bases “similar to the forts used in fighting American
Indians,” Army Captain Shelby Stanton writes in Anatomy
of Division: The 1st Cav in Vietnam (1987). From these bases,
100-man companies ran “screening missions” with three
objectives: monitor enemy movement, destroy small forces,
and block large forces from advancing. Stanton writes that
the NVA responded to these screening missions by developing “well-fortified, superbly camouflaged bunkers built for
mutually interlocking fire and always designed in unique
arrangements. Fields of fire, invisible to advancing cavalry34

bcm v winter 2 0 14

men, were cut in the thick overgrowth only a few feet off the
ground. Caught in such killing zones, entire platoons could
be wiped out in a matter of seconds.”
Tortolani, who traveled south with the division, said of
life in Tây Ninh: “All you could do was try to stay focused,
try to stay healthy, try to eat, try to duck, try to sleep at night,
and try to get home.” He clicked through slides of the area:
pink smoke billowing through a thicket, a distress signal
calling for medics and resupply; a Chinook helicopter raising a destroyed surveillance helicopter from the tall grass
where it fell; a half-dozen wounded soldiers on stretchers
on the ground.
Tortolani flew to the front each morning to treat the
wounded and ill, and caught the day’s last helicopter back to
base camp. “You did not want to get stuck out there overnight. That was for the real soldiers. Every sound you hear
in the field at night is too eerie,” he said. He clicked to a photograph of a tree-covered mountain in the distance, above
an expanse of rice fields. “That’s Núi Bà Đen, Black Virgin
Mountain,” Tortolani said. The 3,200-foot summit was a
strategic prize during the war, with the American military
controlling the peak, and North Vietnamese claiming the
jungle mountainside.
“John would have seen this the night he was killed,” said
photograph: Courtesy of Joyce Fitzgibbons

Tortolani, looking at the screen.
Fitzgibbons was cleared for combat in late November, a
month after arriving in Tây Ninh.

In early December 1968, as Bob Murphy was preparing to
attend his former roommate’s funeral, a letter from Fitzgibbons
arrived, addressed to him and his wife. The envelope was dated
November 8, Fitzgibbons’s 23rd birthday. Murphy wouldn’t
open it—not for 30 years. Then one evening in the late 1990s,
Murphy watched news footage of a belated welcome-home
ceremony for Vietnam veterans. Later that night he opened
Fitzgibbons’s letter in private.
Hi Betty and Bob,
Thanks a lot for your letter. Glad to hear everything is
normal back in the world.
As you know the 1st Air Cav. was located up in the
northern section of Vietnam just south of the DMZ.
Well this past week the entire Division moved about
400 miles south and we are now just off the Cambodian
border.
We’ve been brought down to work in the jungle area
and stop the vast infiltration system and seek out enemy
base camps and recuperation areas.
We are now on LZ [aircraft landing zone] Custer,
which has been overrun 5 times (Custer is a bad omen
anyway). I’ve only had small contacts up north and never
had to tangle with a superior force. It may be a little different down here. I hope to hell not.
It’s a great characteristic of the human being to be
able to adjust to his environment and make the best of it.
However, it’s getting to be a pain in the ass.
I’ve certainly developed a keener appreciation for the
simple things in life. I’m definitely looking forward to
returning to the good life.
Oh by the way Bob I must have given you the wrong
impression about Linda being pregnant.
I was only kidding around saying we’re working on
it—Haven’t had much opportunity lately.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Yours,
Fitz

During their junior year at Boston College, Fitzgibbons
and Murphy lived together in a Cleveland Circle bachelor
pad: fresh sheets and towels courtesy of the Bristol Coat &
Apron Company, an eight-inch black-and-white TV they
found on the street and seldom turned on, and a refrigerator
full of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Schlitz. “There were about 20
guys and 400 girls in the neighborhood,” says Murphy. At

parties they hosted, Fitzgibbons serenaded women guests
with songs by the Beatles, Kinks, and Rolling Stones. “Fitz
was always a bit of a throwback,” Murphy says.
Murphy’s then-girlfriend, Betty Brown (Fitzgibbons was
an usher at their wedding in 1966), often set Fitzgibbons
up with students she knew from the nursing school. During
winters, John and his girlfriend of the season went on weekend double dates to Maine and New Hampshire, sometimes
with Betty and Bob, often with his friend from Wakefield,
Greg Smith, and his young wife, Judy. “He was very calm,
but a tough SOB,” said Smith. “He always wanted to ski the
trails that scared the crap out of us.”
By late 1966, when junior cadets chose which Army
branch to enter after graduating—they ranked their top
three, and the Army selected based on its need and their
merit—more than 380,000 American troops were in
Vietnam, and tens of thousands more were on the way.
Many students chose intelligence or signal corps over infantry. “I thought he would end up in supply,” says Harry Fish
’68, who signed up for the Marines in his senior year and
would later serve in the infantry. “Fitzy was quiet, very erudite and friendly. If he wasn’t an altar boy, I’m going to stop
guessing who was an altar boy. . . . When he ended up with
the ground-pounding grunts, I said ‘Jesus Christ.’”
Fitzgibbons was one of six in his class to enter the infantry. Of the 48 cadets commissioned in McHugh Forum on
June 3, 1967, he was the only one to die in Vietnam.
Murphy says he does not recall what led to Fitzgibbons’s
choice, or whether infantry ranked in his top three. “I just
remember him saying that if he was going to go to Vietnam,
he was going to get the best training he could.”

One night in late November 1968, Dan Fitzgibbons,
a high-school senior, fell asleep in the room he shared with
his absent older brother, and had a dream. He was hacking
through a thicket, following the sound of a man crying in
pain. When he reached a clearing he found John, charred
and bloodied from a grenade blast. The news arrived in
Wakefield days later. Now 63 and the owner of a uniform service company in Worthington, Massachusetts, Dan
remembers the dream more clearly than he remembers the
weeks that followed. “John sent out a laser beam of energy
that night. I believe that, that I was there with him.”
On November 25, Fitzgibbons led his 20-man rifle platoon
into the field for the first time, lugging full combat equipment
for the first time since his training in Georgia. On an unseasonably balmy and clear day (“A downpour would have snuffed
the action that night,” Tortolani said), Fitzgibbons’s platoon,
two other rifle platoons, and a heavy-weapons platoon left their
w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

35

fire support base late in the morning to set up for a screening
mission that night. They would stay within a 15-mile radius of
support artillery at the base. Around seven in the evening, the
soldiers stopped to eat. Under the cover of full darkness around
nine, they began to probe for NVA units. An hour or so later,
the company commander, a captain, concerned about the possibility of an ambush, ordered John to take his platoon out and
reconnoiter. The platoon moved forward, and NVA troops,
hidden in the trees, allowed them to pass, then attacked with
machine gun and mortar fire. “To this day I don’t know why
his commanding officer put him in that vulnerable position,”
Tortolani says. Seven men were killed within minutes, according to the doctor. Francisco Alvarez, 22, from Rio Grande City,
Texas. Melvin Bevier, 20, from Willard, Ohio. Larry Hetzler,
20, from Westlake, Louisiana. Florentino Martinez, Jr., 20,
from Edinburg, Texas. Thomas Whitfield, 20, from Quincy,
Illinois. George Young, 20, from Gainesville, Georgia. The rest,
Tortolani remembers, were wounded. John was the oldest of
the dead, at 23. A grenade knocked him unconscious. He bled
to death from his wounds.
Recalling his examination of Fitzgibbons’s body the following morning, Tortolani says “My training as a physician

Through the front-door
window Daniel Fitzgibbons,
Sr. saw two men in dress blues
and berets. When they asked
for “Mrs. Fitzgibbons,” he sent
them upstairs, too shocked to
understand that they meant
John’s wife, Linda. The offi ers
entered Jean Fitzgibbons’s
bedroom, and she knew.
did not help me cope.” Fitzgibbons was “the one and only
friend I had over there. After that, you put up an emotional
barrier. You’re cordial, you’re pleasant, but you don’t let
yourself get close to anyone.”
Army tradition allows for an officer to escort the body of
a deceased officer from the same unit to burial. Tortolani—
the lone medical officer in the battalion—considered return36

bcm v winter 2 0 14

ing to the States, but says, “I didn’t feel comfortable leaving
the unit. I wouldn’t have even felt comfortable leaving if
there was an illness in my family. I felt an obligation not to
go.” Fourteen men in the 1st Air Cav. died that night. Over
the next eight months, 90 of 900 men in Fitzgibbons’s battalion were killed. Hardly two days passed, Tortolani recalls,
during which his uniform was not stained by American
blood. “I was pretty well beat up. I kind of always have forgiven myself [for not accompanying his body] because I was
just a kid myself.”
Robert Tortolani has practiced medicine in Brattleboro
for more than 40 years, and has treated Vietnam veterans
for decades. Since returning from Tây Ninh in 1969, he has
run counseling programs through the Vietnam Veterans
Association of America. In 1986 he hosted discussion
groups for veterans who were upset by Oliver Stone’s
depiction of the war in the movie Platoon, and today he occasionally counsels local Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. He
thought about John Fitzgibbons more than he thought about
anyone else he served with, but had “pretty much given up
hope that I’d ever get in touch with his family.” A few years
ago, a medical colleague was helping to plan the dedication
of a Vietnam veterans memorial in western Massachusetts,
and Tortolani told him about Fitzgibbons. That doctor happened to spend July 4, 2013, in Boston, happened to pick
up the Globe, and happened to read the story about the lost
medals and their return. He telephoned Tortolani. “That’s
impossible,” Tortolani recalls responding.
That same day, nearly 45 years after he identified his
friend’s body, Tortolani telephoned Joyce Fitzgibbons. “I
wanted [the family] to know that he had a good friend in
Vietnam, and I had a good friend in him. And I was able to
tell her, rightfully so, that he did not suffer.”
In late fall 1968, Fitzgibbons’s high school running mate
Terry Flynn, recently graduated from Georgetown, was
training with the Marines in California, preparing to leave
for Vietnam two months later, when a friend called with the
news. “For years,” he says, “I had these dreams that it was all
a mistake, that I was misinformed.”
Ozzie MacCaughey, another of Fitzgibbons’s childhood
friends, had recently completed the Army’s jungle school
and was packed to leave San Francisco for Vietnam the
next day. “I called my mother in Wakefield to say goodbye, because of course you don’t know what’s going to
happen,” he said in a phone interview from his home
in Winchester, Massachusetts. His mother told him, he
recalled, “John was killed on the Cambodian border and
Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgibbons are looking for you to escort the
remains home.” He could have flown to Tây Ninh to retrieve
the body, then flown home to be alongside his family at
Fitzgibbons’s funeral in the parish church where he used
to see John and his brothers in their matching blue suits. A

graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and
an enlistee (he reported for basic training days before he
received his draft notice), MacCaughey, like Fitzgibbons,
had been trained to lead a rifle platoon. “I just was, I couldn’t
deal with it. Or think about it. It was just too much. I was too
locked in at that point. Everything pointed to that assignment, that mission in Vietnam.” He flew to Vietnam, but
with his platoon. Over the course of his posting, he deliberately kept the shock and pain of Fitzgibbons’s death fresh.
“It was lingering in my mind the entire time I was over there:
Don’t do anything stupid that’s going to get somebody hurt
here and more people hurt back home. We all just wanted
to stay alive.”
“These kids, kids, conscripted into the military service
and they get killed,” he says today over the phone. “What a
waste. What the hell is that about? And for what? What was
John’s death for?”

The Fitzgibbons children had all left the house for the
last day of school before the Thanksgiving vacation. Daniel
Fitzgibbons, Sr. walked downstairs to prepare breakfast in
bed for his wife, as he did every morning. Through the frontdoor window he saw two men in dress blues and berets.
When they asked for “Mrs. Fitzgibbons,” Daniel sent
them upstairs to the bedroom, too shocked to understand
that they meant John’s wife, Linda. When the officer
entered Jean Fitzgibbons’s bedroom, she knew. It was Joyce,
living on her own in Wakefield, who drove the officers to
Linda, then working as a secretary at an auto-body shop
in Allston, across from railroad and truck yards and the
Massachusetts Turnpike. As Joyce and the officers entered
the building and moved in her direction, Linda ran out and
down the busy street. Joyce ran after.
No one recalls how John Fitzgibbons happened to meet
Linda Pickett. Cousin Jerry DeVeer used to go on double
dates with the pair and believes that they met through
a mutual friend in mid-1967. She was from Seekonk,
Massachusetts, on the Rhode Island border, the middle of
five children, hadn’t attended college, and was two years
older than John. Tall, brunette, freckled, “just a knockout. She looked great in everything she wore, especially a
bikini,” remembers Judy Smith. “A real head-turner, and
very sweet,” says Ozzie MacCaughey. Greg Smith recalls a
“very fun-loving [couple]. They were just kids. We were all
just kids.” Joyce met Linda only a handful of times before
her brother was killed, and remembers that from early on,
Linda and John carried themselves “with quiet seriousness.”
Fitzgibbons’s parents urged him to wait on marriage
until he returned from Vietnam. “John knew what was going
to happen,” brother Dan believes, “and he wanted to do
the best possible thing for her.” They married while John

was stationed at Fort Bragg on February 23, 1968, and told
John’s parents when they returned to Wakefield
When the Fitzgibbonses returned with John’s body from
Logan Airport on December 3, police had blocked off
every intersection along Wakefield’s main road, and stood
to salute. The 10 surviving children and John’s parents
filled the first pew at the wake. Fitzgibbons’s paternal
grandparents and maternal grandmother sat behind them.
The rest of the church was filled by a crowd that included
Fitzgibbons’s Boston College friends, former teachers from
Central Catholic, Wakefield’s police and fire chiefs and their
families, and the Fort Devens color guard. Soldiers stood in
dress uniform, sabers drawn, on either side of the open casket. A sheet of glass covered the body. Why? Bob Murphy
asked the undertaker. “All servicemen coming back from
Asia have to be covered like this, to protect from infection
spread,” he recalls being told. Hundreds stopped to pray
and gaze. Fitzgibbons’s sister Maryanne, who flew back
from California to attend, remembers she did not recognize
him. Like Terry Flynn, she says she had repeated dreams “of
someone telling me it was the wrong person, a case of mistaken identity, that it wasn’t John. I would say, ‘I knew it!’”
John was buried at Forest Glade Cemetery in Wakefield,
a mile from his parents’ home. During the funeral, Judy
Smith stayed at her husband’s childhood house in Wakefield
to look after their one-year-old son. “I could just hear those
21 guns go off. That was all I could handle,” she says. John
is buried in the cemetery’s veterans section. Beneath a cross
are his name, his rank, the dates of his birth and death, and
abbreviations of his medals, awarded posthumously: BSM,
Bronze Star Medal, for “bravery, heroism, or meritorious
service”; AM, Air Medal, for “meritorious achievement
while participating in aerial flight”; and PH.
Bob and Betty Murphy returned from the funeral to their
infant son in Wethersfield, Connecticut. “I went from being
a hawk to a dove,” Murphy says. “In my 68 years, I have
never met a better person, and have always felt cheated that
he wasn’t with us. His death was the trigger for me to really
rethink. As time went on I considered Vietnam a total waste
and mistake. Still do today.”
A few months after the funeral, Judy Smith helped Linda
clean out the apartment, north of Boston, in which Linda had
lived with John. “She was packing up the life she thought she
was going to have,” says Smith. They came across the medals. Linda decided to give them to John’s parents. None of
John’s family or friends has seen or spoken with Linda since
early 1970, nor was she ever in touch with them. She lives
in New England. I wrote to her and asked if she would be
willing to talk to me about John, whether in person, on the
phone, or in written correspondence. A brother spoke with
me on the phone and said that she now lives in a nursing
home, unable to speak. She still goes by Linda Fitzgibbons.
w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

37

I had talked with Joyce Fitzgibbons about half a
dozen times by phone and once at an outdoor restaurant
amid honking ferries and I-93 traffic. She had guided me to
Terry Flynn, Bob Murphy, and Robert Tortolani. But she
always offered to speak on behalf of her family. Her siblings,
and especially her mother, hadn’t talked much about John’s
death in the four and a half decades since, she told me. Then,
in mid-October, Joyce called, unprompted. Her younger
brother Lane, nine when John was killed, was visiting from
Georgia, and wanted to see me.
Joyce Fitzgibbons’s white colonial stands on a quiet culde-sac not far from where she was raised. The house contains few artifacts that trace to her older brother. When the
Fitzgibbonses sold their Wakefield home in 1980 after their
youngest child, Andrew, turned 20, they packed up 30 years
and 13 lives and left many things behind. Joyce has kept
one photograph that shows John with the family. It hangs
in her first-floo hallway: a black-and-white taken at a dinner at the Colonial Restaurant in Lynnfield, Massachusetts,
on Mother’s Day 1961. It was a time, Joyce said, “when
life seemed to be on one big upswing. Dad’s business was
great, kids were being educated, everyone growing strong.
We were a thriving, young, very innocent, protected family.” The parents sit in the middle, Daniel, Sr. stout and
smiling in browline glasses on the left, Jean appearing tall
in a floral hat on the right. In spite of the uneaten ice cream
before them, the children stare at the camera. The six girls
wear matching dresses that their family seamstress sewed,
the two youngest boys are in flannel overalls, and the three
oldest boys wear dark suits, white socks, shined shoes, and
buzz cuts. John sits at the front right, grinning just enough
to show his braces.
“He was always our protector, our mentor,” says Lane,
looking at the photograph. At 55, he has the same slim
frame as his three brothers. As we sat in Joyce’s dining
room, Lane—who owns a commercial cleaning business—
said he has just a few memories of his oldest brother: John
home for Christmas, John playing football with the brothers, and searching fruitlessly for John’s face in the window
of the plane at Logan Airport. He has two distinct memories
of John’s death: eating a different cake each day they waited
for John’s body to be returned (it took eight days), and seeing Daniel, Sr. when he got home from school the day the
news came. “I remember my father crying.”
Joyce keeps many vivid memories of her brother, and she
said he still often visits her in dreams. It’s always the same.
“He’s there, and I’m going to go over to him. There’s always
something I’m going to tell him or ask him, but I can’t quite
get there. And he can’t respond to me.”
In waking life, the family kept their anguish sealed. “You
lose trust in an awful lot,” says Joyce. “You had to trust his
training. You had to trust the people in charge of John. And
38

bcm v winter 2 0 14

the people in charge of the people in charge. And the people
in charge of the country.
“It’s still difficult to lay it open. I peek at the memory. I
peek and I test and I open a little more, open a little more,
and then sometimes I have to back away and tell myself,
‘Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.’ It’s hard to think about without
thinking, Why? And what if?”
“And it was never the right time to lay it open,” Lane
adds. More than 20 years after John died, Lane visited his
parents, who had retired to Florida, and brought a videocassette of Born on the Fourth of July, the movie version of
the best-selling autobiography by Marine sergeant turned
antiwar protestor Ron Kovic. “We don’t watch those movies here,” his father, usually patient, snapped at him. “But
that’s how I started finding out about Vietnam, and getting
madder and madder,” Lane says. “Vietnam was never over.
It’s still not over.”
In the last year of his life (he died in Palm Beach in 2005,
at 87) Daniel Fitzgibbons, Sr. began to lament what he
seemed to see as his own culpability in his son’s death. “He
told me he felt guilty,” says Lane. “When all his buddies were
signing up for World War II, his father said no—to wait for
the military to draft him. He said to me, ’Why didn’t I say
no to John? Why didn’t I say, Wait until they call you? Why
didn’t I say, No volunteering on this war?”
As for their mother, she avoided all talk of John’s death.
“We were never allowed to really grieve,” Joyce says. “My
mother never discussed any of this,” says Lane. “She never
said anything.”
Jean Fitzgibbons, 92, has been sitting at the dining room
table and listening to Lane and Joyce speak for most of an
hour. She has deep blue eyes and a strong thatch of white
hair and exudes the same quiet, almost patrician pride she
showed in the 1961 photograph with her children. “I didn’t
have the time to feel sorry for myself,” she said of raising 11
children born within the space of 14 years.
When John died, she said, “My husband just went kaput.
He was like I’d never seen him before or since.” As she
consoled her husband, she remained resolute in front of her
children. She ordered the six funeral dresses for the girls,
arranged for the Mass at St. Joseph’s, where John had served
as an altar boy, and handled the calls—sympathetic and
not. For weeks after an obituary for John appeared in the
Globe’s Thanksgiving Day edition, angry strangers, men and
women, called to berate Jean, asking, “How could you send
your son to Vietnam?” After the funeral, she scheduled a
two-week trip to Florida for the family, to spend Christmas
and New Year’s away from the home John had always
returned to for the holidays.
“He was too good to live,” she says. “But he’s right where
I want him to be, up there.”
In the years since John’s death, she has remained skepti-

cal about the competence of the American military. She told
her children at the dining room table that, when she learned
that two of the men killed in the 2012 attack on the U.S.
consulate in Benghazi, Libya, were former Navy SEALs,
she said to herself, “Just like John: another million-dollar
training down the tubes.”
“I didn’t know you followed that story, Mom,” said Joyce.
“I stay in touch with a lot of things that disgust me. I just
don’t tell you about it.”
Jean Fitzgibbons said that she and her husband stored
the medals after Linda delivered them to the family. But it
was only storage. “There was no such thing as a replacement [for John],” she said. When the family sold their
house, “I was instrumental in them going missing. We had
put them in a container in the children’s room on the third
floor. I didn’t even want to see them. They meant nothing
to me.”

Twenty-nine Boston College alumni died in
Vietnam. John Fitzgibbons knew many of them, and ran
track with two. Marine helicopter pilot Lucien Tessier ’65,
a team captain when John walked on, was killed in a CH-53
Sea Stallion crash in February 1968. Fellow commuter
Mike Counihan ’67, a member of the freshman 800-meter
relay team with Fitzgibbons, left to serve in his senior year.
He was a radio operator in Bình Đinh for a year, and then
agreed to extend his tour by six months. He died in an accident on November 1, 1968, three weeks before Fitzgibbons
was killed. Friends who were in Vietnam learned of their
deaths weeks later in the Stars & Stripes listings, or months
later when they read Alumni News.
“When I flew home from Vietnam, they told us that we’d
be more comfortable landing in civilian clothes,” says Bob
Wilde ’67, who also attended high school with Fitzgibbons.
“There were no parades, you just had to get on with being
back in the world.” Paul Delaney remembers that “people
wanted to forget the war. We just wanted to acculturate to
whatever life was going to be in the Seventies.” There was
little sharing of stories, or of grief.
Enrollment in ROTC plummeted nationwide (and at
Boston College) toward the end of the 1960s and it began to
rise only in the mid-1980s, a dozen years after the Vietnam
peace accord. In October 1970, the University cut its ties
with the program. In 1984, assistant dean of students D.
Michael Ryan ’67, one of six ROTC cadets in Fitzgibbons’s
class to fight in the infantry, helped reinstate the program,
with Northeastern University serving as Boston College’s
Army ROTC host school, as it does to this day.
Beginning in 2005, Delaney co-led with Vietnam veteran
Paul Lufkin ’64 a committee to erect the Boston College
Veterans Memorial on the Burns Library Lawn. The low,

70-foot-long, polished granite wall is inscribed with the
names of alumni killed in wartime military service throughout the country’s history—209 in all. During the dedication
ceremony on Veterans Day 2009, ROTC students read
aloud the 209 names. After the fallen of each conflict
World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War,
Afghanistan/Iraq wars—were declaimed, a cadet called out
“Who will stand for those who gave their lives for their
country?” and for each conflict family members and friends
came forward and lit candles. Delaney and his team contacted hundreds of families and friends, seeking a representative for each soldier. More than 300 attended. Eight of
the 29 Vietnam–era dead were represented by family members. Delaney and Rev. DeVeer, who served as a concelebrant at the Mass before the dedication, had invited Joyce
Fitzgibbons. Joyce asked her mother if she’d like to join her.
“The day before the event she announced she did not want
to go, she could not go, period,” says Joyce. “No luncheon
and the shaking of hands and the thanks for service were
going to make her feel better.” Joyce did not attend either.

Terry Flynn visits John Fitzgibbons’s grave every time
he returns to Wakefield. After the Globe published its story
on the medals’ return, he telephoned Joyce Fitzgibbons.
The two have met and exchanged many letters since. They
visited John’s grave together last fall.
In the middle of January, as she was searching for childhood photographs of John, Joyce wrote me an email. She
noted that she rarely visits Forest Glade Cemetery. “It’s just
a place. There’s nothing there,” she wrote. “I also don’t need
any photographs to remember my brother. John is right
here, in my heart.” She also doesn’t need the medals. They
“may end up on a shelf or in a drawer again, because we do
not pay tribute to false idols,” she wrote.
Flynn had written to Joyce a few days earlier. “He mentioned,” Joyce wrote, “that so many people had to do just the
right things at just the right time and in just the right way
over so many years to have the medals end up being delivered back to our family.” She added: “The medals have been
a vehicle to open discussions that have long been put aside.”
In his 1990 book about the Vietnam War, The Things
They Carried, former infantryman Tim O’Brien wrote, “In
the end, of course, a true war story is never about war.”
The story of John F. Fitzgibbons, his medals, his family,
his friends, his wife, though colored by war, is, in the end,
also not about war. It is about how the dead as we knew
them never leave us. And about how grief, even when
shared, remains untouchable. John Fitzgibbons’s friend
from Wakefield Greg Smith, a man now approaching 70,
laments never seeing John “at our age.” He puts it this way:
“You’re frozen in time with him.” n
w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

t the start of his november 6
lecture sponsored by the Boston
College Alumni Association, Mark Massa,
SJ, dean of Boston College’s School of
Theology and Ministry (STM), listed the
four largest religious groupings in the
United States. First among these, he said,
is the evangelical Protestants. Second
is Catholics, followed by what Massa
related as “former Catholics,” a classific tion that includes those who no longer
practice the faith but might still identify
themselves as Catholic, as well as those
who have gone over to non-Catholic
denominations or given up on religion
altogether. The fourth largest category
is mainline Protestants (the name-brand
varieties including Episcopalian, Lutheran,
Congregationalist). But this group too
involves flocks of ex-Catholics. According
to Massa, one-third of all congregants in
the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts,
for instance, were baptized as Catholics.

40

bcm v winter 2 0 14

Drawing what sounded like nervous
chuckles in the atrium of the Brighton
Campus’s Cadigan Alumni Center, Massa
raised his voice and said: “We have what
NASA in Houston would call a situation
on our hands.”
The dean, wearing an olive sport
jacket over a clerical black shirt and collar,
addressed more than 100 alumni, faculty,
students, parents, and others who turned
up for the Wednesday evening talk titled,
“Five Things the Catholic Church Must
Face Today.” The event was part of the
Alumni Association’s two-year-old Deans
Series, which features lectures by heads
of schools at Boston College, on topics
reflecting their areas of academic expertise.
Massa—whose books include, most
recently, The American Catholic Revolution:
How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever
(2010), a study of the post-Vatican II
era—came to STM three and a half years
ago from his endowed professorship at

Massa: “If you don’t treat people well, they will go someplace else.”

Fordham University. First on his list of
five challenges before the Church was
“passing on the faith to young people.”
Acknowledging efforts in recent
decades by catechists and other religious
educators, Massa gave the Church a
grade of B-minus on this score. He also
gave his audience a reading assignment—
“strongly” recommending Soul Searching,
a 2005 book by Christian Smith, with
Melinda Lundquist Denton. The two
sociologists studied the lives of 267
teenagers of various faiths for several
years and found that Mormon, evangelical Protestant, and religiously observant
Jewish teenagers were most likely to be
familiar with and able to explain their religious beliefs. Catholic teenagers were least
likely. Ironically, their Church runs “more
institutions for passing on its faith to its
young people than all of the other religious
groups put together,” Massa said, alluding
to the ubiquitous parish religious educa-

photograph: Frank Curran

tion programs and the Catholic grade
schools constituting the nation’s largest
private-school system.
The second challenge discussed by
Massa was “the very large and very neuralgic issue of women’s roles within the
Church.”
He threw light on the French social
historians of the Annales School, whose
studies have led them to, among other
sources, parish records in Europe. The
historians found that, for as long as the
Catholic Church has been keeping such
records (since the mid-16th century), a
resounding majority of churchgoers have
been women; Church historians in North
America have noticed the pattern as well,
going back generations. Massa pointed out
that Catholic parishioners today would be
able to make the same observation, which
prompted his question: “Why do so many
Catholic women,” if they predominate in
congregations, “feel excluded from the

Church?” Instead of answering broadly,
the Jesuit mentioned three gestures that
could instantly “create good will” among
Catholic women: using gender-inclusive
language in liturgies (as have the Canadian
bishops, whose guidelines avoid referring
to God as “him”); appointing women as
cardinals to lead Vatican congregations or
departments (which would require only
minor tweaking of canon law, he suggested); and allowing women to become
permanent deacons, a ministry currently
open only to men, married as well as
single. (Massa noted that from the New
Testament we know of women deacons
in the early Church by name—Lydia
and Dorcas in the Acts of the Apostles,
Phoebe in Romans.)
Third up in Massa’s order of urgency
was the priesthood. He reeled off data
points—for instance, the number of U.S.
priests ordained annually has dropped
by roughly half (to a little less than 500)

w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

41

since 1965, even though there are 22 million more American Catholics now than
there were then—and familiar explanations, including the clergy sexual abuse
scandals and the overall disappearance of
celibacy from the Catholic imagination.
(“Celibacy as a prized virtue has gone
into eclipse in our culture,” he noted,
“and many mothers want grandchildren
more than priests in the family.”) He said
the bishops have pursued a short-term
solution, recruiting priests from Africa,
Asia, and India for stints in American parishes, but they need to seek longer-range
strategies, in collaboration with the laity.
He did not venture a prediction as to the
outcome of such collaboration.
Fourth item: “the alienation of many of
the faithful from the institutional Church.”
Massa returned to the subject of former Catholics—among them his own
sister, living in Columbus, Ohio (where
he grew up during the 1950s and 1960s).
A University of Notre Dame graduate,
she served as organist and choir director
of a large Catholic parish there, and one
Sunday morning, the priest berated her in
front of several hundred people at Mass,
for letting the communion hymn go on
too long (“How are we supposed to get
all the cars out of the parking lot in time
for the next Mass?” he is reported to have
barked). Massa said his sister, an unsalaried music minister for 10 years, decided,
“That’s enough,” and left the choir, the
parish, and Roman Catholicism. Massa’s
lesson: “If you don’t treat people well, they
will go someplace else.” That someplace
for his sister was a neighboring Episcopal
church.
Massa’s last item had to do with the
growing tendency among Catholics to
affix ideological labels to one another—
“liberal,” “conservative,” “orthodox,”
“progressive,” and the like. He called on
Catholics to lose the labels, often wielded
as rhetorical weapons. This won’t stem the
polarization that has plagued much recent
Catholic discourse, but it would be “an
excellent first step toward a genuine listening to others,” he submitted.
After speaking for more than half an
hour, Massa stepped away from the podium to engage the audience less formally
in conversation for about as much time.
The lecture-goers were a mix of young

42

bcm v winter 2 0 14

and old, men and women, seated on chairs
assembled in the atrium, and more than
15 of them stood to ask questions or share
experiences of life in the pews. A middleaged woman in a purple suit asked about
inclusive language, and Massa gave a colorful rendering of traditional Catholic and
biblical thought—“God is not a he. God
does not have testicles.” A middle-aged
man in a gray suit asked about women
priests, to which Massa replied somewhat
neutrally, “I don’t know if I’ll see women’s
ordination.”
A twenty-something woman, whom
Massa addressed by first name and who
recently graduated from STM, drew a
sharp contrast between her relationships
with priests at the school (both students
and teachers), which, she said, were highly
collegial, and her current interactions with
parish priests, which are not. (She teaches
at a Boston-area Catholic school.) Massa
suggested that she was encountering “clericalism,” a less collaborative mode of ministry, and for good measure he invoked St.

Thomas Aquinas on how “the argument
from authority”—do it because I told you
so—is the weakest of arguments.
A young woman wearing blue jeans
said she and many other young people
“have no parish.” She has wandered
recently from one parish to another without feeling “welcome.” Massa encouraged
her to keep “shopping around” for the
right parish and told her, “See me after. I’ll
give you a list.” At that point, a young man
wearing a gray fleece sweater spoke up: “I
feel it’s our responsibility as young people
to be that first welcoming person” for
other young people at a parish.
After the Q&A, conversations continued in small groups over hors d’oeuvres,
and Massa was heard to say more than
once, “I love that guy,” referring to his
fellow Jesuit, Pope Francis. “I think it’s
going to be a long conversation,” he had
said of broader discussions about the
future Church, during the Q&A, “but I
want it to be a conversation. I don’t want
it to be battles.” n

Sibling rivalry
By John L. Allen, Jr.
Pope Francis and the loyal opposition

I

have now covered three popes
as a journalist, all of them—John Paul
II, Benedict XVI, and Francis—complex
men who can’t be boiled down to soundbites. But there is, nevertheless, a sense
in which each one has used a signature
phrase that lay at the heart of what he was,
or is, about.
With John Paul II, there is no doubt
that his phrase was, Be not afraid. This
was his invitation to the Church to
recapture its self-confidence, its evangelical swagger, if you like, after a period
of introspection and self-doubt. With
Benedict XVI, we also don’t have to
speculate. His phrase was, Reason and

faith. The heart of Benedict’s proposal to
the postmodern world was that reason
and faith need one another. Faith shorn
of reason becomes fundamentalism and
extremism; reason shorn of faith becomes
skepticism and nihilism.
With Francis, it’s early in the game, but
already I think it is clear what the signature
phrase of Pope Francis is. He’s repeated
it so often that it’s become a mantra: The
Lord never tires of forgiving.
I wrote a column recently in which
I talked about Pope Francis’s older-son
problem. This was a reference to the parable of the Prodigal Son. Over his first
months, Francis has done a masterful job

Amid the ferment of the Second Vatican Council, Pope
John XXIII was asked how he saw his role. He answered,
“I have to be pope for those with their foot on the gas and
those with their foot on the brake.” That’s an insight that
Pope Francis will act upon as time unfolds.
of reaching out to the prodigal daughters
and sons of the postmodern world. But
I think there are some older sons in the
Church, people who would perceive themselves as loyal Catholics who have been
carrying water for the Church for a long
time, who are feeling a bit left out.
At present, there are at least five
such older sons. First, there are pro-life
Catholics who worry that Francis’s determination to dial down the rhetoric on
issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and
contraception amounts to unilateral disarmament in the culture wars. Second, there
are some doctrinal purists in the theological community who worry that the pope’s
freewheeling style risks confusion about
core elements of Church teaching, including sin and salvation.
Third are liturgical traditionalists who
feel that this pope does not foster the
same spirit of reverence and awe for the
Church’s worship that they associate with
Benedict XVI. Fourth are political conservatives who are concerned that all of
Francis’s talk about the social gospel could
shade off into an uncritical embrace of the
political agenda of the secular left, even on
matters that have nothing to do with faith.
And fifth are some Church personnel, in
particular people who work in the Vatican,
who are just a little tired of hearing Francis
describe them as careerists, as infected
with the “leprosy” of a royal court, as
being excessively Vatican-centric.
In April, Pope Francis will canonize
two of his predecessors, John Paul II and
John XXIII. This is going to happen on
the 27th of April, which is Divine Mercy
Sunday. And that in itself is a statement
about unity in the Church. Amid the ferment of the Second Vatican Council, Pope
John was asked how he saw his role. His
answer was this: “I have to be pope for
those with their foot on the gas and those

with their foot on the brake.” I think that’s
an insight that Pope Francis will act upon
as time unfolds.
Francis will do what he can to foster
unity in the Church. And all Catholics can
help him in their own spheres of influence.
On this point, I speak as a media professional. In the global media culture, Francis
has dramatically changed the narrative
about the Catholic Church. Prior to his
election on March 13, 2013, the dominant
media narratives about the Church were
the sexual abuse crises, Vatican meltdowns
(including stories of money laundering
at the Vatican Bank), and bruising political controversies, of which the standoff
between the U.S. bishops and the White
House over contraception mandates as
part of healthcare reform is a leading
example. And while none of those themes
have gone away, today the dominant
narrative in the global media about the
Catholic Church is, Rock Star Pope Takes
World by Storm.
We Catholics are theoretically committed to evangelization. Under John Paul II
and Benedict XVI, evangelization emerged
as the highest internal priority of the
Church. Pope Francis represents a historically unique and precious evangelical calling card. He represents an opportunity to
reintroduce an often jaded and cynical secular world—a wide swath of which tuned
out the Catholic Church a long time ago—
to the Catholic message. How do we best
take advantage of that? I can tell you how
not to: that is, by allowing the momentum
generated by Francis to be sucked into the
internal tribal rivalries of the Church.
There’s an old joke that makes the
point. A dad relaxing in his living room
hears a ruckus. Upstairs he finds his kids
sitting in a circle in folding chairs screaming their lungs out at each other (“You’re
an idiot”; “No, you’re completely wrong

and I can prove it”). When the dad asks
what is going on, one of the kids looks up
and says, “Don’t worry. We’re just playing church.” Religion, which speaks to
the deepest passions of the human soul,
seems to breed division almost as reliably
as it does devotion. We in the Catholic
world are no strangers to that dynamic.
Here’s the thought I want to leave
you with: Resist the temptation to “play
church” with Pope Francis. If those who
are most enthusiastic about this pope
can resist using his words and deeds as a
club to beat up on others in the Church
they don’t like, and if those who are most
ambivalent about this pope can resist a
rush to judgment, then I think we may take
maximum advantage of the unparalleled
missionary opportunity that the cachet of
this pope represents. The Church wants
to bring people to the faith, and also to be
a leaven in the culture in favor of peace,
justice, and human dignity. Its capacity to
do all that is significantly enhanced by having a pope who profiles as the new Nelson
Mandela, meaning the world’s most
respected moral authority no matter what
religion you belong to or what political
persuasion you adopt.
We now have the attention of the
world. If what people see when they look
in on the Catholic Church is a community
united around the Pope’s emphasis on
leadership as service, around the social
gospel, and around mercy as a core spiritual principle, if they see a community
enthused to carry forward those projects
in the postmodern world, then we stand a
decent chance of being effective evangelical agents. We may have a winning strategy for the pastoral life of the Church in
the 21st century. n
John L. Allen, Jr. was a senior correspondent
for the National Catholic Reporter before joining the Boston Globe this year. On October
30 in Robsham Theater, he delivered a talk
on “The Francis Papacy: Reform, Renewal,
and Resistance,” from which this essay is
drawn. Allen’s most recent book is The Global
War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front
Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution (2013).

A video of John Allen’s lecture on the
Francis papacy is available via Full
Story at www.bc.edu/bcm.

w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

43

CONTE NT S
45 Refusenik

End
Notes

The year is 1986, and the author is
Central Russia
47 Local color

The Chinese school of Christian art
48 Tool box

What Catholic moral theologians
reach for when they work
49 Hades and the Linguists

A poem

44

bcm v winter 2 0 14

From the McMullen Museum

19. The setting is rural, a barracks in

On the occasion of their son Christian’s graduation on December 12, Steven and Kimberly Rockefeller (whose son Steven III graduated in 2009) presented the McMullen
Museum with The Nativity, an etching by German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528).
The print measures 7 1/4 x 4 11/16 inches and is dated 1504. McMullen director
Nancy Netzer describes The Nativity as “one of the great impressions by one of the
great printmakers of all times.” To see an enlargement go to www.bc.edu/bcm.

photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

REFUSENIK
By Maxim D. Shrayer
The year is 1986, and the author is 19. The setting is rural, a barracks in Central Russia

B

eing sent to assist the rural population with the
collection of agricultural crops was a common experience of Soviet studenthood—and also of life in Soviet cities.
Throughout my childhood, my father and his fellow researchers
at the Academy of Medical Sciences would spend two or three
autumn weeks outside Moscow, helping collective farmers. The
agricultural dispatches stopped for my father after we became
refuseniks in 1979—when my parents applied for and were
refused emigration and lost their academic jobs. As a rank-andfile Soviet physician in a local health center, my father was so
needed that the potato-picking ceased to be mandatory. For
Moscow University juniors, however, the fall semester started
almost a month late. We contributed virtually free labor to the
Soviet agricultural economy.
The colloquial expression in Soviet Russian was to be sent na
kartoshku (literally, “for potatoes”), although the nature of the
crops changed, depending on climate and location. In the spring
of 1993, when I was doing Nabokov research in Prague, I was
surprised to learn from a Czech woman my age that in the Eastern
Bloc days she, too, had been sent on agricultural works. Except the
students in Prague were mainly used to pick hops, an agent in brewing beer. “Therein lies all the difference,” I remember saying to her.
Chashnikovo, where the university had a summer campus,
was located about 30 miles north of Moscow. Although considered a small town (selo) because it had a school (and once had
a church), it was really a village with geese ambling along the
unpaved streets. In the fall of 1986 Chashnikovo was a sorry
sight. Protracted rains, common in Central Russia in September,
had turned dirt roads into sleeves of mud. The barracks where we
stayed had no heat and were made of plywood, and there was no
way to read except with a flashlight. Roofs leaked and windows
were missing glass panes.
To most of us the place seemed like a penal colony without
strict work enforcement. Not the tired Soviet motivational mottos like “To fulfill and overfulfill the norm!” but pot-boiling and
time-passing were the bywords of the day. We were paid some
fantastically low wage per unit of “workday.” Only a few of my
fellow students—the army veterans from rural areas of the country—preferred the manual chores to studying, worked with verve,
and opted for overtime.
Our workweek, like the school week, consisted of six days,
with Sunday off. The day started with some bronchial song of
labor enthusiasm blaring from the loudspeaker, with gruel and
tasteless tea at the refectory, and the daily lineup and head count.
Then we would trudge through muck to one of the naked, flooded
fields surrounding the Chashnikovo campus. Most days we were
harvesting potatoes or carrots. A tractor would plough a row

across the field, and a group of us would follow with buckets,
picking up some of the crop and stomping what remained under
the surface of the thin clayish soil. Sometimes we left the smaller
tubers and roots for the local population to prey on after dusk.
This was a student operation, and there was practically no local
supervision. I remember once or twice being called “lazy city sons
of bitches” by a bristly manager yelling from the cab of his pickup
truck. I slacked off as inventively as I knew how. At some point I
arranged for a doctor’s note documenting an acute attack of hay
fever and recommending bed rest. The weeks of potato-picking
are a blur of sunless days and drenching rains.
By the end of each day, our Chashnikovo-issued quilted jackets and pants would be heavy with water and mud. At night, we
would leave our boots and wet, dirty clothes in a small communal
room with heaters, and when they were dry, the clay-splattered
pants and coats would stand on their own like petrified life-size
puppets. In the morning we would have to break them apart from
their hardened embraces.
There was heat only in the central cottage with its community
room, TV set, and telephone line, on which we could receive but
not make calls. One evening, I entered the community room and
saw a group of my classmates, mostly girls, glued to the TV screen.
“What’s on?” I asked but only got “hush, be quiet” in response. It
was a regular TV show, The Camera Faces the World, something of
a Soviet cross between ABC’s 20/20 and CBS’s 60 Minutes. As my
luck would have it, the show’s host announced that Soviet viewers
would have the opportunity to see a re-broadcast of an American
documentary titled The Russians Are Here. (The title must have
been a play on Norman Jewison’s film of 1966, The Russians Are
Coming, the Russians Are Coming.) The host explained that the
documentary had been released in the United States (in 1983)
and focused on the lives of those who had left the Soviet Union
and settled in America. He added that several years after the
documentary’s release a Soviet TV crew had located some of the
émigrés featured in the film and interviewed them for the show.
These interviews, the host said, would serve as a tacit commentary
on the “hollow” (I think this was the epithet he employed) lives of
the “former Soviet citizens in emigration.”
I must have been the only one in that room full of
university students who had heard of the PBS documentary prior
to its showing on Soviet television. I had learned about it from
the letters of my parents’ friends living in America. After it was
first shown on PBS, the film had generated protest among Soviet
émigrés. One friend living in Washington, D.C., even enclosed a
clipping from a New York Russian daily. The émigrés found particularly objectionable the film’s portrayal of them as being unable

w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

45

The author, at right, with fellow university students, picking potatoes.

to integrate and assimilate, as being somehow unappreciative of
the “freedoms” and “values” of American society. And now before
me, unfolding on the screen, were scenes of Jewish-Soviet immigrants suspended between a Soviet past and American present.
The documentary featured an interview with Lev Khalif, a poet
who had been a friend of my father’s in 1960s Moscow before
emigrating in the 1970s. Khalif stated that in the Soviet Union at
least the KGB was reading his work, whereas in the United States,
nobody did. This portrait of a Russian poet in America, unwanted,
dejected, deprived of his readers, was particularly jarring to me,
considering that Khalif was my father’s peer. I haven’t seen the
documentary since 1986, but I do remember clearly that in its
tenor the American film was disdainful of “the Russians.”
So there I was, a refusenik hiding beneath the tattered facade of
a regular Soviet student relaxing after a day of work in the fields of
his motherland. There were about 25 of us in the community room,
and several of my female classmates openly wept when the camera

hen he arrived in China in 1922 as its first Apostolic
Delegate, Archbishop Celso Costantini brought a fresh
missionary vision, set out in Pope Benedict XV’s 1919 encyclical Maximum Illud (“On the Propagation of Faith Throughout
the World”). Benedict encouraged the cultivation of indigenous
clergy and the integration of local culture into Church activities.
Costantini (who became a cardinal in 1953) promoted the founding of Furen Daxue (the Catholic University of Peking) in 1925 and
within it, in 1930, an art department that fostered works incorporating the styles and traditions of China—students studied classical
techniques of painting with calligraphy brushes on vertical scrolls
of paper and silk—in Christian imagery.
“Rising gothic spires,” opined Costantini in 1923, “are in magnificent harmony with the countryside of Northern Europe; but
I am not in anyway able to say the same about the gothic towers
that I have seen nestled among bamboo groves during my journey
throughout China.” The tradition of the Church, he later wrote,
“tells us that we should make use of the art of a given people and of
a given time.” By the time the Furen art department closed, in 1952
following the communist revolution, its students had produced
hundreds of pieces of Chinese-style Christian art, depicting subjects ranging from the Visit of the Magi to the Crucifixion.
Lu Hongnian (1919–89) was a 1936 graduate of Furen and
among the earliest of a generation of artists to produce such
works. His rendering of the Annunciation (right) bears the
inscription, in Chinese: “Painted by Taicang Lu Hongnian, at
Beiping, Spring Festival, 1947.” Lu employed elements traditional in an Annunciation scene: the angel carrying white irises
(symbolizing purity), the Holy Spirit (represented by a dove),
and the kneeling Mary. But he introduces indigenous symbols,
as well. The angel hovers on Chinese-style clouds, an allusion
to the apsaras (female spirits common in Hindu and Buddhist
mythology). The furniture and fashion are classically Chinese—
the window shutter with its fretwork, the low red table, the
angel’s hairstyle.
Bamboo and flowers were notable features of Chinese artwork, and Lu displays a mastery of them. The bamboo fronds
and stalks outside the open window are delicate yet distinct, a
nod toward the reverence of the natural world expressed in both
Daoism and Buddhism. Finally, the orange daylilies in the foreground are exactly what a Chinese person would expect to see at
Spring Festival, since the flowers symbolize birth. n

Jeremy Clarke, SJ, is an assistant professor of history and the author
of The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History (2013),
from which this account is drawn. The book may be ordered at a
discount from the Boston College Bookstore via www.bc.edu/bcm.

photograph: Courtesy of the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, USF Center for the Pacific Rim

w i n t e r 20 14 v b c m

47

TOOL BOX
By Ben Birnbaum
What Catholic moral theologians reach for when they work

M

oral theology is a live science, which is why
stonings of adulteresses are notoriously difficult to find
in Jewish neighborhoods, why students at Baylor University dance
on Saturday nights, why Catholics in retail banking offer mortgage loans without fear of being turned away at the altar rail, and
why no viable religious tradition is today without a well-wrought
view on organized labor or in vitro fertilization.
But changes within religious traditions run great risks if they’re
shaped only by need and circumstances and not a binding grammar of thought. In Judaism, coherences emerge from (and contribute to reshaping) a vast rabbinic literature. For Methodists,
the Wesleyan Quadrilateral of Scripture, tradition, reason, and
experience centrally shows the way. Buddhists begin with karma,
the four noble truths, and the eightfold path.
Over the centuries, Catholic theologians have been prodigious
in their development of principles by which to build a coherent moral theology, which the Catholic Encyclopedia defines as
“relating to man’s free actions and the last, or supreme, end to be
attained through them.”
Liberation theology is among those principles, as is its early
progenitor the Sermon on the Mount. So are standards that enjoin
consultation with neurologists and others that enjoin consultation
with Aquinas. Some of the most ambitious of these theological
rules of the road—such as the Syllabus of Errors—are today in
permanent storage, while others as simple as the principle of subsidiarity (see below) seem always to be in some theologian’s hand.
The Handbook of Roman Catholic Moral Terms (Georgetown,
2013) is a catalogue of selected words and phrases currently in
use, compiled and annotated by James T. Bretzke, SJ, a professor
of moral theology at Boston College’s School of Theology and
Ministry. Over 258 pages, Bretzke offers relatively brief entries
ranging from “ABC” (an acronym for an anti-AIDs program
that translates as “abstinence, be faithful, and condom use”) to
“Zielgebot” (a German word literally meaning “fulfillment command”), which refers to an ideal behavior that cannot on this earth
be attained. Below is a sampling drawn from the book.
Centesimus Annus (Hundredth Year) is John Paul II’s 1991
encyclical commemorating the 100th anniversary of Leo XIII’s
Rerum Novarum, which is considered the first social encyclical.
Centesimus Annus condemned both communism and many aspects
of capitalism that lead to oppression of the poor and insufficient
attention to the common good in the state’s role to guarantee
human rights such as a just living wage, good working conditions,
and so on.
Consequentialism is an ethical theory that denies the premise
of an objective moral order knowable through the natural law and
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instead posits that ethical rightness or wrongness of an action is
determined by a consideration of the consequences of the action.
Desuetude, meaning “disuse,” is used primarily in canon law to
denote laws and customs that have fallen in broad and sustained
lack of observance and so lose their binding force.
Double effect principle (commonly termed PDE) is well established in the casuistry from the manualist tradition [see below]
to the present. It is used in quandary situations in which a single
composite action has at least two foreseen effects that cannot be
separated: one that is good and desired and others that are bad
and are tolerated. Amputation to remove a gangrenous limb,
treatment of an ectopic pregnancy, and just war theory all use
the PDE.
Faculty in moral theology refers to the inherent capacity or practical ability to do something with intention to realize a goal or end.
For example, humans have the faculty of speech, which has a goal
of the communication of truth. Anything that would obstruct or
frustrate that legimate end, such as speech contrary to what one
believed, would be contra naturam to the proper end of speech.
Human experience, though difficult to quantify or qualify,
nevertheless remains one of the indispensable fonts of moral
theology. A moral system that excluded human experience as a
key source would run the risk of becoming merely an abstraction
divorced from concrete reality.
Ignorance: Invincible ignorance is that which cannot be overcome by the person, and thus removes culpability for actions that
otherwise would be objectively wrong. Vincible ignorance is that
which can be remedied if the person were only to take sufficient
effort. Crass or supine ignorance is a more serious form of vincible ignorance for which the individual has little excuse.
Intuitionism, a philosophical theory popular among some early20th-century analytic philosophers, posits that an individual’s
own intuition is the fundamental mode of grasping moral knowledge and reality, including knowledge of God.
Lex indita non scripta (law is inscribed [on the human heart], not
written down) is Thomas Aquinas’s expression to describe how
humans come to grasp the natural law, that is, the human participation in God’s own lex aeterna (eternal law).
The manualist tradition dates back to the 17th century, when
moral theology became established as a recognizable discipline

and was marked by series of moral manuals written primarily for
the training of priests to hear confessions. The most important
manualists were Jesuits, Redemptorists, and Dominicans.
Minjung theology emerged in the 1970s as an Asian form of
liberation theology engaged in theological and political resistance
against the military dictatorships and economic oppression in
South Korea.
Nemo tenetur ad impossibile (No one is held to the impossible)
is one of several variations of a basic principle in discernment of
both human and natural law that holds that one cannot predicate
a moral “ought” or duty except upon a reasonable expectation that
the corresponding duty, action, and so on can be performed without reaching the limits of physical or moral impossibility.
Premarital sex in most contemporary sexual ethics is distinguished from nonmarital sex because the former term has come to
refer to sexual activity of a couple that fully intends to marry but
has not yet celebrated their Church wedding. Domestic partners
would be another example of a more committed but not-yetmarried sexual relationship. Nonmarital sex, by contrast, refers
to sexual activity not only outside of marriage but without the
presumed commitment to marry within the foreseeable future.
Proof-texting takes isolated passages, for example, a biblical
verse, out of context in order to “prove” the validity of a proposition in a manner that reflects neither the intent of the author nor
the content of the document as a whole.

Hades and the Linguists
By Joseph Spece
Consider:
with the armor-bearer come
and Heracles
mewling at his loss,
with Sisyphus
muttering sick,
with lovely Narcissus
so long in abscission
let us make a Tartarus cant.
Consider a rebus
for our mammoth gates
that means
Going and gone—to fire.
Enlist the queen to refigure
winter
as a handful of seeds.
Place the sailor Charon
on coin to mean Captain.
Consider next
patterning Cerberus
in brick

Scrupulosity either sees sin where there is none or exaggerates
the gravity of lighter venial sin, making it into serious or mortal sin.

to silence these waifs

Subsidiarity as outlined in Pius XI’s 1931 social encyclical
Quadragesimo Anno is “a fundamental principle of social philosophy, fixed and unchangeable, that one should not withdraw from
individuals and commit to the community what they can accomplish by their own enterprise and/or industry.” This means that
decisions, policies, and their implementation ought to be handled
at the lowest practical level since this level would more likely be
better informed about the concrete needs and realities of the situation and able to deal with them more effectively than at a much
higher level.

of such tedious desire,

Vitalism, a putative moral principle that holds that because life
is absolutely sacred, we must do everything to preserve biological human life at all costs, as seen in a cultural and technological
ethos, which holds that everything that can be done to save or
prolong a life should therefore be done. However, this rigorist
view is not the Roman Catholic moral tradition. n

who lie crying for love;
he’s the very likeness
bark, roil, and snore
bound by one neck.
What to call, finally,
these torturous days
that find no dusk?—
slave, fashion a brazier
with the face
of Prometheus.
Erase the dead’s names
and give each a mirror
that they might utter I abjure.
Joseph Spece ’06 is editor of SHARKPACK Poetry Review.
His first book of poems, Roads (Cherry Grove), appeared
in 2013.
“Familiar Voices,” an @BC video interview and
reading featuring Joseph Spece on campus, may be
viewed via Full Story at www.bc.edu/bcm.

w i n t e r 20 1 4 v b c m

49

Inquiring
Minds

WHAT THE BARBER SAW
By Jeri Zeder
A historian’s lucky encounter with an 18-century Damascan

“T

his book arises from a footnote . . . upon which I chanced
more than a decade and a half ago.” So begins assistant professor of history Dana Sajdi’s The Barber of Damascus (2013), a
warm, learned social and cultural study rooted in the 18th-century
Ottoman Levant, shortly before the Arab Renaissance.
When she stumbled on that fateful footnote, Sajdi had been
searching for the voices of ordinary Middle Easterners from a
different time—the medieval era—
for texts comparable to the handful of writings produced by ordinary
Europeans of the day. The footnote,
in an academic tome spanning 800
years of Arab historical thought,
mentioned the existence of a chronicle covering the years 1741–62 by a
barber named Shih¯ab al-D¯ın Ahmad
.
Ibn Budayr, who tended to customers
in a tony section of his thriving city.
Sajdi learned of others who authored
chronicles in this era: a farmer in
South Lebanon, two soldiers, a court
clerk, a Greek Orthodox priest, a
Greek Catholic priest, a Samaritan
scribe, and a merchant. These individuals feature in her book, but her
focus is the barber, with his record
of events in Damascus and environs,
of food prices, natural disasters, and
street battles, and, he would complain, breakdowns in the moral order.
Whether his news is about “a prostitute walking down the street being
drunk, or . . . about sexual scandals,”
Sajdi says, “it’s really a community
gossip report.”
For a time, as Sajdi worked, the
only known version of the barber’s
chronicle was a bowdlerized edition prepared by a 19th-century
scholar, published in 1959. Then, around 1999, Sajdi was poring
over catalogue entries at Jordan University with Shahab Ahmed,
an associate professor of Islamic studies at Harvard, when Ahmed
came across a listing for the barber’s original chronicle under
“miscellany.” The manuscript, it turned out, was housed at the
Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. Sajdi could now work from two
documents—the unadorned Arabic on faded yellow paper, penned
by the barber himself, a professed man of “the small people”; and
the later version, “refined” (as its editor put it) through a 19thcentury, upper-class sensibility. Among Levant scholars, the 19th

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century, with its modernizing press, forays into constitutionalism,
and stirrings of nationalism, is considered more interesting than
the less-studied 18th. Sajdi used both versions to delve deeply into
18th–century life and link the two periods.
What strikes Sajdi most about Ibn Budayr, she says, is his
“audacity,” not only in voicing anger toward the ruling al-’Azm
dynasty and its agents, but in “the simple and remarkable fact of
his authorship”—of his self-authorship.
A conservative man by social and
religious measures, the barber frequently denounced the government’s
disregard of people’s suffering: “The
unruly soldiers of Damascus have
committed excesses, cursing of religion has increased, the commoners
have been oppressed and no one listens to what they say,” he recorded.
Yet a reader can hear his heart
breaking as his 14-year-old son takes
sick and dies: “He was snatched away
within two days—Oh, my brothers!—
as if he never was!”
Sajdi coins the term “nouveau
literacy” to describe the emergence
of 18th-century Ottoman chronicles
by humble commoners. (Her book
is subtitled “Nouveau Literacy in the
18th-Century Ottoman Levant.”)
Traditionally, the recording of news
was reserved to the `ulama’ (“people
who know”), i.e., scholars and clerics.
It does not appear that the barber’s
account was published in his time.
But given its epic form and rhymed
prose, Sajdi hypothesizes that the
text may have been read aloud or performed in popular gathering places
such as cafés. Nouveau literates such as Ibn Budayr, she suggests,
presaged the rise of print journalism in the 19th century.
Sajdi, who grew up in the Palestinian occupied territories,
Jordan, and Egypt, hopes chronicles by the barber and his peers
will serve to flesh out today’s limited views of the Middle East
with “voices of real people . . . navigating their environment and
responding with all their humanity to changing times.” n
Jeri Zeder is a writer based in the Boston area. Sajdi’s The Barber of
Damascus may be ordered at a discount from the Boston College Bookstore via www.bc.edu/bcm.

illustration :

Polly Becker

Works &
Days

Lavy in her office, mailbox at her elbow.

Corrective
Vision
By Haley Edwards
Policy advocate Jody Kent Lavy ‘02

photograph: Mark Finkenstaedt

Inside the doorway to Jody Kent Lavy’s
small office near K Street in Washington,
D.C., hangs an aluminum letterbox, the
kind with a narrow slot on top. The front
has been torn off; insert a letter, and it will
flutter to the floor. Lavy is the director
and national coordinator of the Campaign
for the Fair Sentencing of Youth (CFSY),
a coalition advocating age-appropriate
sentences for children and teenagers. She
encountered the letterbox nearly a decade
ago, at a men’s jail in Los Angeles, while
investigating conditions there for the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
“Inmates were supposed to put their complaints in it,” she says. “It was useless.”
Lavy speaks quickly and with passion.
She joined CFSY in 2009 with the assignment to generate a national strategy for
abolishing end-life sentences for minors.
On her eight-person team are a litigation
specialist and a state strategist, in addition to development and communication managers. Her collaborators have
included Human Rights Watch and the
American Bar Association, as well as the
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. In
2012, the U.S. Supreme Court declared
that imprisoning juveniles for life without
parole on the basis of mandatory sentencing rules (and absent consideration of what

the Court called the “hallmark features”
of youth, such as immaturity and impulsivity) violated the Eighth Amendment.
Now, lower courts wrestle with whether
or not this decision applies retroactively
(Pennsylvania’s top court, for instance,
says no.) So Lavy has gained another task:
persuading governors directly, and the
public through radio interviews and op-eds
in major newspapers, to support re-sentencing hearings for 2,000-plus prisoners
who were incarcerated for life as juveniles.
A communication major in college,
with a minor in faith, peace, and justice,
Lavy’s dedication to these issues grew
out of a post-graduation year spent in
the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, working at a
homeless advocacy agency in Los Angeles.
During her free time she volunteered with
teens in a residential detention center,
which led to three years with the ACLU of
Southern California filing complaints with
prison officials on behalf of inmates.
When Lavy moved to D.C. in 2006
to become a policy coordinator for the
ACLU’s National Prison Project, a sheriff’s deputy gave her the broken mailbox—
as a keepsake, perhaps, and reminder, she
says, that “the work is never, ever done.”
Haley Edwards is a writer in Washington, D.C.

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